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user\nLos Angeles, 1976. Indie film brat John Carpenter, fresh out of film school and with one film - his class project's no-budget spoof of 2001 called Dark Star - under his belt, finishes a gritty actioner called Assault On Precinct 13. The story of an almost deserted police station under siege by an unseen LA gang, it was a minor hit on the drive-in circuit and garnered small praise from the few critics who cared, but it hardly set the film world on fire, unlike Carpenter's follow-up smash Halloween (1978). On Precinct, Carpenter was still learning how to exploit his almost non-existent budget by using lower-shelf actors, keeping the action to the one hellishly small location, and moving the film along at a tight pace with a combination of editing, intelligent camera work and switched-on genre savvy.
No-one wants or needs to be hungry in Hollywood anymore, particularly if the week's catering bill on the 2005 version of Assault On Precinct 13 is more than the entire cost of the original. It does translate into a certain kind of laziness on a filmmaker's part - you have a stupidly large union crew, a studio and a marketing firm all doing your thinking for you. Which is why twenty years after watching Carpenter's film I can still see every glorious moment, from the small girl gunned down in cold blood while buying an ice cream, to the relentless pounding synth score. A week after Assault 2005, I remember Larry Fishburne's unmoving ping pong ball eyes and little else.
\"Forgettable popcorn actioner\" fits the top of the poster perfectly. It's New Years Eve at Precinct 13, a station closing down with a skeleton staff to see in its final hours. On call is Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke), an ex-narc now deeply troubled and hopped up on Jack Daniels and Seconol after his partners were iced in the opening scene; Iris (The Sopranos' Drea de Matteo), a nympho with a thing for criminal types, and Jasper (Brian Dennehy), a crusty old timer one scotch away from retirement. As in Carpenter's Assault..., a bus with four heavy-duty criminals is rerouted to the Precinct. All boozy eyes are on gangster kingpin Bishop (Fishburne, still beefed-up from his time in the Matrix) who has narrowly survived an assassination attempt from an undercover cop and plans to blow the lid on the endemic corruption in the organized crime unit led by Marcus Duvall (a tired-looking Gabriel Byrne). Soon the phones are out, the power lines are down, and both crims and police find themselves heavily armed with a serious police arsenal and consumed with paranoia while waging war against a task force of Duvall's corrupt cops sporting white balaclavas, bullet vests, infra-red bazookas and more high-tech gear than the Skywalker Ranch. This, we're expected to believe as the helicopters buzz around the top of the police station shooting rockets into windows, is a clandestine operation to cover Duvall's tracks. He may as well have taken out billboards on Hollywood Boulevard.
As with the recent Seventies genre reworking Dawn Of The Dead, Assault 2005 takes the barest plot essentials of John Carpenter's original and, to quote the Seventies, \"does it's own thing, man\". The main question is - why bother? John Carpenter's 1976 is a cult favorite among genre buffs, but is hardly branded in the public's collective consciousness. Carpenter himself was busy reworking Howard Hawks' classic western Rio Bravo into a tight, claustrophobic urban thriller for only $20,000. French wunderkind director and rap producer Jean-Francois Richet, a self-professed fan of John Carpenter's work, seems less concerned with making an homage to either Hawks or JC - although the script is peppered with references to cowboys and injuns - and seems intent on squeezing in as much flash and firepower as the multi-million dollar budget can withstand. The result: some tense moments with hand-held POV cameras, an unexpectedly high (and bloody) body count, a few neat plot twists, but essentially a B-grade urban actioner with a much inflated price tag. As for name-checking Carpenter, it's pure conceit on the part of the filmmakers that doesn't pay off.
To Monsieur Richet, I say bon voyage, and I wish you luck on your music career.
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