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DVD Assault on Precinct 13 (Full Screen Edition)
Action buffs will have a fine time with the spray of bullets, shattering glass, and pyrotechnic silliness that makes up the bulk of Assault on Precinct 13. Updated from the little-known cops-and-robbers classic John Carpenter made in 1976 (two years before he made his name with Halloween), this high-concept thriller is mostly a lowbrow kill-fest, and is very happy with itself for being so efficient in both categories. A decrepit police station on its last night before retirement--New Year's Eve, no less--plays unexpected home to a gang of criminals who become snowbound in the basement lockup. Another mysterious gang of people who stealthily gather in the blizzard outside want one of the particularly nasty criminals (Laurence Fishburne) dead, and they'll take the rest of the precinct down too, by golly. The odd lot of characters trapped inside include a burned-out sergeant (Ethan Hawke), a sexpot secretary (post-Sopranos Drea de Matteo), an even sexier police psychologist (Maria Bello), and various other good guys and bad guys who variously go down in blazes of guts, glory, bullets, and fire. Hawke and Fishburne are opposite sides of the coin: the law, and the bathroom scale. Their need to partner in order to survive the guns outside is the movie's moral conflict, and both actors chew on Precinct 13's peeling walls and scuffed floors to drive the point home every chance they get. Obvious filmmaking fakery abounds in everything from the irksome snowstorm, frequent gunshots to the head, and a shadowy forest that conveniently presents itself in an industrial section of Detroit for the climactic showdown. No matter, this Assault is for non-thinkers who want blood and gunpowder, with no messy slowdowns for logic, please.--Ted Fry
Review(s): DVD Assault on Precinct 13 (Full Screen Edition)
Predictable but still quite watchable if you go for Ethan and Lawrence
I'm giving this 4 stars because even though some of the characters were really predictable, the chemistry between Ethan Hawke and Lawrence Fishburne was fabulous. On that merit alone, it deserves 4. The rest of the movie is about a 2 1/2.
The characters are very stereo-typical. You get very little about the background of Bishop (Lawrence Fishburne's character) and Ms. De Matteo's character is constantly referred to as "Secretary". Ethan Hawke's character gets some exploration, but it's nothing original and I'm not totally sold on the conversations between he and his "shrink".
Ja Rule's character, Smiley, is a bit silly and the psychiatrist's character was really underdeveloped. I did like John Leguizamo's character though he was mostly annoying. He, at least, had interesting things to say even as he irritated those around him.
Still, the action was good and the director made a point to make the fights as realistic as possible (meaning avoiding those scenes where someone jumps 20 feet across the room or avoids a bullet through a move that defies gravity). There were some unnecessary bits though, like a scene between the therapist and DuVall, the villain.
I still laughed and enjoyed the suspense of this film. It is honestly fun to watch as long as you keep it in perspective. Just go into it for the fun of watching Ethan Hawke and Lawrence Fishburne banter back and forth about whether they are going to kill eachother or kill the cops hunting them.
I think that the movie could've ended differently, though I appreciated the resolution of the situation between Ethan and Lawrence.
I'm sorry that I don't remember any of the character's names other than Bishop and Smiley. It's that kind of movie. You can remember the roles people played, but you may not remember their names unless you've just gotten through with the movie. The characters are essentially JUST roles because they aren't fleshed out enough other than to be The Crime Lord, The Sarge, The Veteran Cop, The Secretary, The Junkie Criminal, The Shrink, the Female Criminal, The Silly Criminal, The Cop Who Foolishly Returns, The Villain, and the faceless Henchmen.
So, as long as you don't expect anything more of this movie and you go into it for the chemistry between the main characters, you'll do just fine with ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13! You'll also be quite happy if you like guns and things blowing up!
Assault on Logic
This is one remake that we really didn't need. The original, as dated as it is, could be considered the movie that made John Carpenter's career. The original, made in 1976, is not a bad movie, if you surrender yourself to Carpenter's synthesizer stylings and a plotline that defies logic. A gang of bad guys leads an assault on a police precinct, turning the whole precinct into a war zone for one night. The main problem with doing a remake of this story is that it was a difficult concept to believe in 1976, and there have been quite a few technological advances in the last thirty years. Unless they were going to do this as a period piece, it's just not the kind of story that you can do in the age of high-speed internet, PDAs, cell phones and laptop computers.
The filmmakers' solution to this was to have the whole thing take place on New Year's Eve and also to build into the plot the fact that the cops in the doomed precinct are getting ready to move to a new precinct. If that sounds like flimsy logic to you, raise your hand. So what we are treated to in the first 10 minutes of the movie are a lot of really painful scenes of exposition where characters say things like, "Seeing as how it's New Year's Eve, and I've shut down all the computers and the phone lines are down, we might as well get drunk!"
The set-up is difficult to believe, and it's almost as if the actors all know it. It's really painful to watch actors like Gabriel Byrne, Lawrence Fishburne, Ethan Hawke and John Leguiziamo struggling through this ridiculous garbage. If you can survive this Assualt on Logic, and you can suspend your disbelief in spite of overwhelming odds, you'll get to see the bad guys attack the precinct. From there, it's one long, continuous shoot-out. It is, of course, interspersed with scenes where we find out that some of the cops in the precinct are not entirely good, and some of the criminals are not entirely bad. What's most amazing is that EVERYONE in the movie gets shot right between the eyes. I'm not even kidding. Every single character gets shot right in the forehead, whether it's by close range or by sniper rifle. Admittedly, I don't know too much about shooting people, but it seems like the odds of everyone getting shot right between the eyes are a bit of a longshot. Ah well, it gave the director plenty of opportunity to show actors staring off into space with a tiny red hole in their forehead. Maybe the director was trying to make a statement.
On the whole, the production values are good and the cinematography isn't bad. It's just a completely ridiculous scenario, badly executed with dialog that would get cut from the worst soap opera. The actors, talented as most of them are, seem to know that they've signed on to be in a turkey, so they turn in performances that feel stale and uninspired. In the end, you just have to wonder if we really needed a remake of this movie, especially when it turned out to be so much worse than the original.
Overated !
It's funny right.Throughout the whole movie the convicts and or the Police have full clips at all times.It gets old after you notice it two times in a row.Your able to notice this because the clips on the AR15 are clear , and you'll notice the clips stay full even after Larry Fishburne or Ethan Hawke unload the entire thing on 1 man.There's a few things that were realistic and pretty cool ,but the majority of the movie was cahcah.I gave it two stars for the weapons , lol.
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