Sheldrake gets popped in the head by ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13

Hey folks, Harry here - I'm going to try and get my review written tonight, because frankly this is a movie I absolutely love. Every now and again there's a remake that works real well, this is one of those. And before anyone goes and gets indignant about remaking a John Carpenter movie... What sort of John Carpenter fan doesn't at least approach a remake with an open mind... after all, John's a remaker himself, and a damn fine one. Hell, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 is essentially a remake of RIO BRAVO. Well, I get more into that in my review. Till then, here's Sheldrake in New York. He's got spoilers clearly marked at the end of this review - but then I disagree with his take on them, and counter after his review... so watch out, if you're planning on checking this baby out today or soon! Meanwhile - if you're still not convinced... check out this RED-BAND trailer that UGO has - it's many times better than any of the advertising for this film I've seen so far! CLICK HERE

Assault on Precinct 13.

directed by Jean-FranÃ§ois Richet

written by James DeMonaco

2005

Sheldrake reporting from Broadway and 50th in New York City. This is a morning screening, and I’m fighting rush hour crowds at 8:45 am and it’s 15 degrees and Sheldrake is longing for his office and executive washroom. I grab a cup of coffee at a cart and hold it in my hands for warmth while I’m pushing downtown through a cold uptown wind. Finally I get to the Brill Building and by then, three blocks from the cart, the coffee’s gone cold.

I’ve been looking forward to this one, Assault On Precinct 13 – the original is favorite of mine, and, for that matter, so is just about any John Carpenter movie. I love the Atari video effects, I love the synthesizer scores. I love the career making performances.

So when this thing started to surface I felt protective, worried. I felt a little better when I saw the cast, Hawke, Fishburne. Maria Bello, good. Now I just got out of the screening and I am jumping up and down, they just nailed this one. It’s got the best Lawrence Fishburne role since The Matrix 1 and draws on his work in a 1992 movie, Deep Cover. Ethan Hawke does great work in a mode that is completely different from his Training Day work, even though the role takes place in the same kind of world. In TD he was a rookie learning the ropes. Now imagine that rookie ten years later. A year ago everything went bad, people died in an arrest situation. He’s drinking and taking pills to stop all kinds of pain.

This is the kind of movie that’s not supposed to be made with too big a budget. The whole thing is supposed to be a mess, everything’s being shut down, it’s the last day of your life in this piece of crap building and you’re glad to be out of it. Even the light is supposed to look dirty. Outside the building in this movie, the area is desolate, bleak. We never get a clear picture of it, except for some wooded areas at the end of the movie. All that’s outside this building are people that want to get inside and kill you and everyone else. That’s all that matters, that’s all that is out there in the darkness, that’s all you see when you look outside into night while people you don’t trust, people you hate have your back.

So you live in fear. You make partners where partnerships weren’t possible. You take painkillers and booze to quash your fear. “There are two ways to die: with self-pity and without self-pity,” the Fishburne character, Marion Bishop, says in the movie. Damn, rarely have I seen a character with less self-pity than Fishburne’s. Remember how Harrison Ford looked the first time he walks on screen in the train station as John Book in Witness? That’s the kind of effect Fishburne has in this role. It’s an iconic performance, one that casts his career in a whole new light – when he walks on screen there’s very little else you want to look at. When he’s in front of the camera your either all tensed up or laughing your ass off or just marveling at the supernatural charisma this guy throws off. Ethan Hawke, as Sergeant Jason Roenik, wisely makes space for Fishburne’s performance, not that there’s much choice.

The first few minutes of the movie I wasn’t sure what kind of movie was up on the screen. There’s a bust, a time lapse, a doctor/patient conversation, then we see Fishburne getting picked up, Gabrielle Byrne’s character reacting to one of his men getting killed. The screenwriter is corralling all his characters and I’m thinking, what does this remind me of: then it hits me, this is “the calm before the storm,” I’m watching an Irwin Allen disaster movie! Yeah, it’s the Poseidon Adventure, Red Buttons and Shelly Winters and Gene Hackman, we’re getting little pieces of their story, we’re all boarding the ship before the wave hits ths ship—and it’s New Year’s Eve. But then during the Ethan Hawke, Sergeant in Charge, and Maria Bello, examining psychiatrist, scene, I’m thinking – now THIS reminds me of something, and then I know: it’s the “your hiding behind rules and regulations, don’t mince words, Bones” scene in Kirk’s apartment from Khan. Then later, we get the walk-down-the-series-of-cells scene from Dirty Dozen (and later we get the WE MADE IT Franco scene from DD, quoted word for word), where we hear the low-life history of the characters behind bars, the ones who will do all the fighting later in the movie. It’s also a key character scene for Hawk: when he unlocks those doors, he’s leaving behind his identity as a cop. And this was supposed to be just a training cruise!

So now I start to clue in to this director’s strategy - look, he’s like you, he’s like the audience, he wants to get to the GOOD PARTS even more than you do, faster you do, but he has to get some of this story out, so he couches it in movie fan terms, puts it in scenes we already are plugged into in our movie-going memories and it conveys the meaning and emotion of the scenes more efficiently than it would otherwise. Now, you can complain about that – hey, could we have some actual WRITING going on here?—but I’d rather admire the savvy of the approach, especially because he does it so well. It works and does exactly what he intended, gets you into the story faster.

This movie is about light and bullets and bodies and lasers from rifles invading a dark place. It’s about a community whose order is threatened by the attack, the only way they can survive is to kill the old community and make a new order. It’s family/love relationships (Duvall and his men and their families) vs professional relationships (Hawke’s sense of duty). As the movie goes on and the police station gets more and more beat up, we feel the physical and emotional wear on the characters.

But finally the movie is a great ensemble character piece, with two strong leads in Hawke and Fishburne. Each character is measured against not only the way they deal with the others, but with the likelihood that they’re facing death. Marion Bishop’s first speech in his first scene is, in fact, about how his constant exposure to death has changed his ideas about God – his world is Homeric, not Christian, a world where when a man falls he does not rise again. As the station comes down around them, never to rise again, as people begin to die, Roenik and Bishop are united by their watchfulness: Roenik’s eye is always on Bishop, and Bishop’s is always on a way out the door.

Some other other characters and notes:

Marcus Duvall (Gabrielle Byrne) is a man whose soul hasn’t died, but its flickering out. He took little steps over the line over a period of years and one day he wakes up and he’s on the wrong side. He’s a little bewildered by it but so terrified by the consequences of years of corruption that he keeps taking another step into the darkness. If Fishburne lives without self-pity, Duvall lives without hope of heaven, like the Paul Newman character in Road to Perdition.

(Jasper) Brian Dennehy, who is quickly turning into Brian Keith in Sharkey’s Machine, is becoming a character actor as time passes, and he does a good job here as the Irish cop ready to retire. In SPOILERS below I’ll talk about him some more, but not here.

Ja Rule (Smiley) started off really annoying me in the movie by referring to himself constantly in the third person. “Smiley shouldn’y be in here. Smiley is this, that, whatever).” My God is that a warhorse. The writer needed to work harder to find something for this character: he’s the most underwritten in the movie. It’s been said by other that it’s to Ja Rule’s credit that he takes the character and makes it work on screen, and that’s right. I want to see him in something else, hopefully in a movie where he’s not working to establish gangsta street creds.

They handed the reigns to John Leguizamo and let him improvise. Absolutely the right decision, he’s like a Robin Williams who reads the Village Voice. Every scene with Leguizamo and Lawrence Fishburne in it at the same time will burn holes in your brain, they’re that good together. His burnt out junkie has one of those wandering motor mouths that has Leguizamo stasge poetry buried in each sentence.

Aisha Hinds is a girl gangbanger with one leg planted in Jennette Goldstein and another planted in Cassavetes as Victor Franco. She’s a great screen presence and draws audience sympathy whenever she’s on camera.

Matt Craven is an actor you cast for type – someone whose loyalty is always questionable – and that’s the role he plays here. I’d liked to have seen some more of his character during the second part of the movie, to make some of the misdirection in the movie work a little better.

This movie has Magical Woods Movie Lighting, where there’s enough light for the audience to see stuff, it’s no worse lit than your average after-hours club, but somehow the characters aren’t able to see as well and soldiers use night-vision goggles.

It was interesting seeing a Mexican Standoff in a movie that wasn’t over stylized and barely genuflected towards St. Quentin.

The score directly quotes the original seventies score in places.

*********SPOILERS *********

one question – why doesn’t the shrink help the guy who got shot – my guess is she’s a psychiatrist and an M.D. But she just lets him bleed to death while checking out her Glock or whatever.

I don’t like that the first two to die were the low men on the totem pole, the bus drivers, too predictable

Smiley’s character speaking of himself in the third person is REALLY annoying.

I wanted to see at least one woman assault cop, even a more then one, but there weren’t any – didn’t dig that – and hey, here’s an idea, how about getting their wives involved fighting!

They made the right choice with Fishburne’s fate at the end, but I could see arguments for doing it the other way too

This movie is about Hawke’s effort to recover his identity as a cop – he gives up more and more of it throughout the movie, Gabrielle Byrne claims it – the greatness of the line at the end – there’s only one cop here, is the moment he reclaims that identity

They tell us Fishburne is a cold-blooded killer, but they load the dice by having the dirty cop in the church try to kill him first. I would have liked it better if Bishop had just iced the cop “just to watch him die.” If he’s cold-blooded then make him cold-blooded already!

I can imagine an ending that pits Bishop against Roenik. It might have made the movie a little tougher.

The whole red herring thing. They could have made two changes to make it better. Show us a little more of the Matt Craven character, let us see him as afraid as the others, that's better than the "always show him from the outside" approach. And show us Jasper discovering the sewer.

One little note to Shelly here... The cops tell us Fishburne is a cold-blooded killer... A gangster, a man on the street - a complete and utter badass has a code, no organized criminal that is working deals with bad cops and running a complete criminal underground would just kill indiscriminately. Gangsters have internal codes, built to protect themselves, keep their way of life, their way of life. Had Larry just iced him - he would be picking a fight with his direct business partners, which he was trying to avoid with that meeting, but when they asked him to pull his asschecks apart nicely and smile for the dirty pigs, he simply, and according to his code declined the offer. Because these pigs had nothing on him, that he didn't have on them, and ultimately that's the end game. BUT when little piggy decides to show threat or violence, well... Larry does the right thing and treats that piggy like a Ned Beatty over a tree hump. SuuuuuuuuuiiiiEEEEEEEEEE! As for having the women Vasquez out and be total badasses as Paxton would say... frankly... I'm tired of that. Sometimes, they're human beings first, and that's what I liked about the women here. Besides, Miss Thompson was a mean muther, and I liked her plenty!