But someone -- who could it be? -- is particularly interested in one of those prisoners, notorious crime lord and cop killer Marion Bishop (Fishburne). In scary hoods and padded vests, those big, bad nasties circle Precinct 13 and begin rattling its doors and blowing out its windows. Roenick and his visiting prisoners (they also include John Leguizamo as a psychotic junkie and Ja Rule as a small-time hustler), as well as a merry band of misfits, huddle inside. Among the refugees are the precinct's hottie receptionist, played by Drea de Matteo; a cheerfully crusty police veteran (Brian Dennehy, a sometimes fine actor who is also, unfortunately, the originator of the patented cheerfully crusty dial-a-performance); and Maria Bello, as Roenick's shrink, who's on her way to a New Year's Eve party but who must return to the precinct owing to the bad weather -- she shows up in a sparkly, strappy dress and Ugg boots, which she promptly trades for clickety-clackety golden sandals, as one usually does when entering a decrepit precinct building.

Carpenter's original "Assault on Precinct 13" was inspired by Howard Hawks' superb and deeply touching western-as-neighborhood "Rio Bravo," and even in this exceedingly pale imitation, you can see sparks of Hawks' spirit here and there, particularly in the way the performers interact: Unlikely alliances are formed; loyalties shift and reassert themselves, often uncomfortably. The crime boss and the sexy secretary find themselves strangely attracted to each other in the midst of all the violence; the shrink turns out to be far less in control of her emotions than her troubled patient is.

Hawke is much better here than the material warrants: He speaks every line, even the unconscionably stupid ones, as if it means something, and now that he's getting older we can see that his snaggle-toothed vulnerability, which could sometimes seem like an affectation when he was younger, rests deep within his bones: It informs his performance here, even in the moments when silliness and useless brutality clump around him. And Bello, who has always been such a likable actress that only since "The Cooler" has it become obvious just how good she is, gives off a radiant, prickly warmth here -- she's untainted by the movie's bumbling ill humor.

There's some good gore in "Assault on Precinct 13" -- one of the thugs is dispatched via the old icicle-through-the-eyeball routine -- but for the most part, even when the movie is at its noisiest and most violent, it feels curiously inert, as if it were thinking too much instead of allowing itself to ride its wilder impulses. And pulp needs a pulse -- without one, it's DOA. No matter how hard some of its actors work to resuscitate it, "Assault on Precinct 13" is as lifeless as a corpse on a slab. You could prick it with a darning needle and you wouldn't be able to raise a twitch.

"Assault on Precinct 13"

Directed by Jean-François Richet

Starring Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Maria Bello

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