The first thing you miss is the music. That funky, synthesizer throb. That heartbeat of stone-cold menace. Everyone loves the iconic tinkle of John Carpenter’s Halloween theme, but two years earlier, he composed a score every bit as infectiously stark, instantly setting the tone of his low-budget 1976 thriller Assault on Precinct 13. When Hollywood got around to remaking Assault in 2005, they went a different way musically. (The trend of modern genre movies with throwback electronic soundtracks was still a few years off.) Right from the jump, you feel the difference. The conspicuous absence of vintage Carpenter boogie is merely the most audible sign that a minimalist classic has been fruitlessly maximalized.
In the dubious field of remaking John Carpenter movies (a matter on which the director himself has been bluntly, hilariously pragmatic), the 21st-century Assault on Precinct 13 sits far from the bottom. It might, in fact, be the cream of a crop that includes an entirely forgettable upgrade of The Fog that opened just a few months later, a redundant prequel to The Thing, and Rob Zombie’s numbingly extreme Halloween. But the aughts Assault, which turns 20 years old today, also neatly illustrates and maybe exemplifies how these do-overs go wrong: They always manage to sacrifice the elegant simplicity of Carpenter’s work.
Broadly speaking, the Assault remake is faithful. The script by James DeMonaco tweaks some details and relocates the action from sunny Los Angeles to a wintry Detroit blanketed in a blatantly digital snowfall. But the essence of Carpenter’s story, itself a riff on the jailhouse defense scenario of the timeless Hollywood oater Rio Bravo, remains intact: The skeleton crew of a shuttering police station joins forces with the criminals they’re detaining to fend off an armed siege. The good guys are on the inside, the bad guys on the outside — a configuration DeMonaco would revive, a few years later, with The Purge, another Carpenter-indebted thriller starring Ethan Hawke.
The star and that durable, slightly reworked premise are two reasons the Assault remake works at all on its own terms. Hawke brings a conflicted gravitas to the role of the beleaguered sergeant — a lieutenant in the original, played by Austin Stoker — who brokers an uneasy New Year’s Eve alliance between the staff of his defunct station and the offbeat personalities in the holding cell. He’s introduced undercover, doing wiry drug-pusher shtick that’s, admittedly, a little more fun than the rise-to-the-occasion hero routine he otherwise adopts throughout the film.
Besieged by enemies bearing down on his rickety fortress, Hawke’s honest cop is forced to work with a notorious Detroit kingpin played by Laurence Fishbourne, then coming off the Matrix sequels and coasting on the cucumber cool that had, by that point, become his signature. While the first Assault put the cop and killer on friendly terms early on (they sort of innately accepted the need for cooperation), the remake keeps their union tense and reluctant. Can they really trust each other? It’s not a bad twist on the central relationship, though you can sense director Jean-Francois Richet — who recently arranged a very similar dynamic in the Gerard Butler vehicle Plane — straining for some of the morally ambiguous friction of Hawke’s good cop/bad cop pairing with Denzel Washington four years earlier.
Back in ’76, Carpenter casually smashed stereotypes by making the courageous, upstanding cop a Black man and the imprisoned killer a white man. Nu-Assault flips those roles around for a supposedly post-racial 21st century. Yet the remake actually feels much more hung up on differences of race and gender than the original, which pointedly pitted a multi-ethnic LA gang against a group of desperate survivors who accept each other as equals, dispensing quickly with any ingrained biases. Compare that to the heated, loaded discord of the remake, and how DeMonaco indulges in othering cliches: John Leguizamo and Ja Rule have been cast as broadly comic hoodlum caricatures, while the female survivors played by Drea de Matteo and Maria Bello are saddled with hacky battle-of-the-sexes banter.
If there’s one intriguing upgrade to the Assault template, it’s the twist that the encroaching villains are actually dirty cops this time, out to kill Fishbourne’s arrested crime lord before he can roll over on them in court. (They’re led by Gabriel Byrne, supplying a face — and a chilling rationality — to an enemy force that Carpenter depicted as essentially faceless, like a plural Michael Myers.) Making the bad guys police creates the possibility of an enemy within the station— an element of internal distrust that, combined with the sub-zero temperatures of the setting, makes this Assault feel somewhat indebted to Carpenter’s The Thing, too. Unfortunately, that plot development also undercuts the heroism of the heroes’ last stand: Since the bad cops are going to kill everyone inside no matter what, there’s no moral dimension to the good cops refusing to hand over the kingpin.
As with so many remakes, Assault on Precinct 13 will play best for those who haven’t seen what it’s failing to improve upon. As an action movie, it’s merely proficient — and at this point, as much a time capsule as the original was in 2005. (You could ballpark its release date from the shaky, frenetic camerawork and the tint of cool-blue color correction Richet favors.) It probably goes without saying that the film’s urban warfare lacks the organizational clarity of the original’s, which came courtesy of one of the most spatially mindful of American masters. But even conceptually, this is a more generic battle royale: While Carpenter gave his trespassers silencers, positioning them as a terrifyingly quiet and stealthy threat (and helping account for why backup doesn’t arrive), Richet just cranks up the cacophonous gunfire.
As with Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, which arrived the previous year, a masterclass of ’70s mayhem is given a louder, bigger, dumber makeover. The action is more deafening, but not more thrilling. There are more characters, but they’re not more interesting than the original’s trio of circumstantially aligned, practically minded badasses. And though the body count is higher, Richet never achieves a moment of carnage as shocking as the infamous mic drop of the old Assault: that moment when the bad guys heartlessly gun down a little kid.
New Assault is not without its cheap pleasures, some related to good casting, some to the durability of the conceit. But 20 years later, it hasn’t aged nearly as well as the original. Mostly, the impression is of a remake that couldn’t or wouldn’t commit to what made its lean, mean predecessor special. The bloating of a brilliantly minimalist genre exercise extends from the choppy action to the post-traumatic “motivation” supplied to Hawke’s virtuous cop, whose defense of the castle also needs to be a shot at redemption, a chance to make up for past mistakes. Carpenter knew we didn’t need all that. He trusted the primal, Hawksian appeal of his premise: three steely individuals fighting for their lives against crashing waves of human malevolence. Blown up and out to no good end, this Assault leaves you pining for Carpenter’s compositions, visual and obviously musical.
The remake of Assault on Precinct 13 is available to rent or purchase from the major digital services. Or you could just watch the vastly superior original, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
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