The first thing you miss is the music . That funky , synthesizer throbbing . That flash of stone - inhuman threat . Everyone loves the iconic tinkle ofJohn Carpenter’sHalloweentheme , but two years in the beginning , he composeda score every bite as contagiously stark , instantly setting the tone of his depleted - budget 1976 thrillerAssault on Precinct 13 . When Hollywood drive around to remakingAssaultin 2005 , they went a different way musically . ( The trend of advanced musical genre moving picture with atavistic electronic soundtracks was still a few eld off . ) the right way from the parachuting , you feel the departure . The blatant absence seizure of vintage Carpenter boogie is merely the most hearable foretoken that a minimalist classic has been fruitlessly maximalized .
In the doubtful field of refashion John Carpenter movies ( a matter on which the director himself has beenbluntly , hilariously pragmatic ) , the 21st - centuryAssault on Precinct 13sits far from the bottom . It might , in fact , be the cream of a crop that include an entirely forgettable rise ofThe Fogthat opened just a few months later , a supererogatory prequel toThe Thing , and Rob Zombie ’s numbingly extremeHalloween . But the aughtsAssault , which turns 20 years old today , also neatly illustrate and possibly exemplifies how these do - over go wrong : They always do to sacrifice the refined simmpleness of Carpenter ’s work .
broadly speaking speaking , theAssaultremake is close . The book by James DeMonaco tweaks some details and relocates the action at law from gay Los Angeles to a wintry Detroit blanket in a blatantly digital snowfall . But the essence of Carpenter ’s floor , itself a riff on the jailhouse defense scenario of the timeless Hollywood oaterRio Bravo , stay on entire : The skeleton in the closet crew of a shuttering police post join forces with the malefactor they ’re detaining to fend off an armed military blockade . The good guys are on the inside , the unsound bozo on the exterior — a form DeMonaco would recreate , a few age later , withThe Purge , another Carpenter - indebted thriller star Ethan Hawke .
The star and that perdurable , more or less reworked premise are two reason theAssaultremake industrial plant at all on its own terms . Hawke brings a conflicted lordliness to the function of the beleaguered sergeant — a lieutenant in the original , played by Austin Stoker — who brokers an ill at ease New Year ’s Eve alliance between the faculty of his defunct station and the way-out personalities in the holding cellular telephone . He ’s inclose hugger-mugger , doing wiry drug - pusher shtick that ’s , admittedly , a lilliputian more playfulness than the ascending - to - the - occasion hero bit he otherwise embrace throughout the film .
Besieged by enemies bearing down on his rickety fortress , Hawke ’s honest cop is storm to work with a notorious Detroit kingpin played by Laurence Fishbourne , then coming off theMatrixsequels and coasting on the cucumber aplomb that had , by that point , become his signature . While the firstAssaultput the bull and killer on well-disposed terms early on ( they sort of innately bear the need for cooperation ) , the remaking keeps their marriage tense and reluctant . Can they really desire each other ? It ’s not a unfit crook on the central kinship , though you may sense director Jean - Francois Richet — who recently arranged a very alike dynamic in theGerard ButlervehiclePlane — straining for some of the morally ambiguous friction of Hawke ’s estimable cop / spoilt bull couple with Denzel Washington four days originally .
Back in ’ 76 , Carpenter casually smash stereotype by making the brave , upstanding cop a Black man and the put away killer a clean man . Nu - Assaultflips those role around for a supposedly post - racial 21st century . Yet the remaking actually feel much more hang up on differences of wash and sex than the original , which pointedly match a multi - ethnic LA gang against a chemical group of despairing survivors who accept each other as equals , dispense quickly with any ingrained biases . liken that to the heated , load strife of the remaking , and how DeMonaco indulges in othering banality : John Leguizamo and Ja Rule have been cast as broadly funny hoodlum caricatures , while the female subsister bet by Drea de Matteo and Maria Bello are saddled with hacky battle - of - the - gender backchat .
If there ’s one intriguing upgrade to theAssaulttemplate , it ’s the twist that the encroaching villains are really lousy cops this fourth dimension , out to wipe out Fishbourne ’s arrest crime lord before he can undulate over on them in court . ( They ’re lead by Gabriel Byrne , supplying a brass — and a chilling rationalness — to an foe military unit that Carpenter depicted as fundamentally faceless , like a plural Michael Myers . ) Making the bad guys police creates the possibility of an foe within the place — an element of internal distrustfulness that , combined with the sub - zero temperature of the setting , spend a penny thisAssaultfeel somewhat indebted to Carpenter’sThe Thing , too . Unfortunately , that plot growth also undercuts the valour of the heroes ’ last viewpoint : Since the bad pig are going to kill everyone inside no matter what , there ’s no moral proportion to the good fuzz refusing to hand over the headpin .
As with so many remake , Assault on Precinct 13will play best for those who have n’t seen what it ’s failing to better upon . As an natural process movie , it ’s simply proficient — and at this peak , as much a meter condensation as the original was in 2005 . ( You could ballpark its release day of the month from the shaky , frenzied camerawork and the tint of cool - risque semblance correction Richet favors . ) It credibly go without saying that the film ’s urban war lack the organisational clarity of the original ’s , which came good manners of one of the most spatially mindful of American victor . But even conceptually , this is a more generic battle royale : While Carpenter gave his trespassers silencers , positioning them as a terrifyingly subdued and stealthy threat ( and helping story for why stand-in does n’t get ) , Richet just cranks up the cacophonous gunfire .
As withZack Snyder’sDawn of the Dead , which make it the previous class , a masterclass of ’ 70s mayhem is give a louder , heavy , dumber makeover . The action is more deafening , but not more thrilling . There are more fiber , but they ’re not more interesting than the original ’s trio of unexpectedly aline , much minded badasses . And though the body count is gamy , Richet never achieves a instant of carnage as shocking as the infamous mic dip of the oldAssault : that moment when the bad guys heartlessly gun down a little kid .
NewAssaultis not without its cheap pleasance , some related to good cast , some to the lastingness of the conceit . But 20 age later , it has n’t age nearly as well as the original . Mostly , the impression is of a remake that could n’t or would n’t give to what made its thin , mean predecessor special . The bloating of a bright minimalist genre exercise extends from the jerky activeness to the post - traumatic “ motivation ” supplied to Hawke ’s virtuous cop , whose defense of the castling also needs to be a shot at redemption , a chance to make up for past mistake . Carpenter be intimate we did n’t need all that . He trusted the primal , Hawksian solicitation of his premise : three steely individuals fighting for their lives against crash wave of human malevolence . bodge up and out to no skillful ending , thisAssaultleaves you pin for Carpenter ’s composition , ocular and obviously musical .
