It's a cold and snowy New Year's Eve in Detroit as major crime figure Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne) is being transported by policemen across town with other, lesser criminals. The snow khamsin forces their trash to detour to the Administer Department's Precinct 13 building, which is closing down for re-location. The officers are planning a farewell party, combined with New Year's Eve and reluctantly lock up the prisoners. But when black vans liberate a group of SWAT-like operatives at the structure, led by important cause Marcus Duvall (Gabriel Byrne), the Precinct's senior political appointee, Sergeant Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) learns that Bishop's pending testimony against corrupt cops has put them all in deadly danger. Now, the crime boss and the cop must make an effort to go together -along with the motley crew in the building - just to survive the unresponsive and deadly round-the-clock.
Sole of the biggest challenges in the service of writers revamping functioning thrillers made anytime before the mid 90s is the bloody mobile phone. It has punched a dent in many retread scripts, and Precinct 13 is another casualty. Unless you totally restructure the script to detect allowances on the digital phone years, you're snookered as paralysed a progress as credibility goes. In 1976, when the original was made, if the phone lines were mow (by man or nature), there were no alternatives. In 2004, every self respecting crim, not to mention a psychatrist and a twisted cop, has at least one unstationary phone.
Putting that untimely oversight aside, the picture boasts an excellent shy working their hearts out. Ethan Hawke, playing a tortured cop whose feloniousness beside an earlier undercover operation's deadly culminate is invoked to perform him some demons, parlays this Roenick character into a suitably tormented figure under the control of pain.
Laurence Fishburne brings the good of ballast to his character as felony boss Marion Bishop (what's in a name?) as Gene Hackman might, occupied of authority and charisma. Gabriel Byrne is also effective as the ice hearted baddie, with Brian Dennehy making the most of the veteran cop with great wells of fire scorching beneath his regimentals.
The two central female characters (Maria Bello and Aisha Hinds) are given plenty to do, and the action is well paced. The action would also be receive, if only cinematographer Robert Gantz had insisted on shooting it all without the hand held mould. It's evident from the 'tripod' shots that he can descend a background, frame and move the camera, but when he takes up the round of applause held camera for close-knit up action and ruckus sequences, he does a disservice to the film. Some of the pass out held pans stop up looking like home videos made by an over-hearty P of a late digital camera. The fad is extinct; let it rest.
Yet another flaw to overlook; until the climactic scenes of the protagonists battling it out, both in atypical advance terms and in simple action heroics. All is sedately until the undertaking moves outside the Precinct building and we find ourselves in a veritable forest, seemingly adjacent to this New Zealand urban area obstacle. It's no medial city park, as the final shot would have us suppose, but if you can forgive all its trespasses, Attack on Precinct 13 may enjoy enough gritty strength, SWATy gunplay and smart dialogue, tense stand offs and adroit letter insights to content you as the week's Saturday Darkness Special.
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ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
(MA)
(US, 2004)
Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Brian Dennehy, Gabriel Byrne, Ja Bypass, Maria Bello, Aisha Hinds
Pascal Caucheteux, Jeffrey Silver, Stephane Sperry
Jean-François Richet
SCRIPT:
James DeMonaco (John Carpenter, integument 1976)
CINEMATOGRAPHER:
Robert Gantz
EDITOR:
Bill Pankow
MUSIC:
Graeme Revell
PRODUCTION DESIGN:
Paul D. Austerberry
UNINTERRUPTED TIME:
109 minutes
AUSTRALIAN DISTRIBUTOR:
UIP
AUSTRALIAN RELEASE:
March 31, 2005