Assault On Precinct 13 (2005/HD-DVD)
Picture: B
Sound: B+ Extras: C Film: C-
It was bad enough that Hollywood has decided to remake and
ruin nearly every great Horror film form 1960 to the early 1980s, but that the
hack spree has extended to non-Horror genre films from Horror masters like John
Carpenter is a real shame. In the case
of the original 1976 Assault On Precinct 13, it established Carpenter as
auteur and launched his career. The
2005 remake by Jean-Francois Richet tries to be hip, along with some strange
reversals and rearrangements in James DeMonaco screenplay that smack of
political correctness despite the mindless, tired use of expletives. You can see how bad DeMonaco really is as a
writer if you have suffered through the Francis Coppola misfire Jack and
The Negotiator, which also thinks swearing is so… urban.
In the original, an army of revolutionaries with street
roots and connections are on the attack, with nothing to loose and everything
to gain. They are from the working class
at best, but no longer integrated in the system if they ever were, and are
going for broke. That adds edge to the
entire film. By comparison, the new
attackers are not street guys of any kind, but corrupt police officers who are
pretty much all white officers. For one
thing, African Americans are a large number of the revolutionaries in the
original film, so the reversal is trying to negate latter-day misconceptions of
race to begin with that makes the situation worse as denial always does.
The other problem besides the condescending reversal is
the idiocy of have the cops shoot up a station within their own network. Add that they are legally appointed and
governmentally endorsed professionals in the application of violence, and you
get cops shooting at other cops, even if it brings a “good and bad guy” of
opposite skin colors together to fight the “bad cops” in what is an arrangement
clearly aimed at negating any of the thrills or political edge of the
original. It also tries to ethnically
cleanse the disturbing factor and guilt of the original film, like how the
minority characters of the original may have never had a chance and that drove
them to possibly in part to revolutionary activity. The film is not so much a “get whitey” film as a “get stupid” one
as everything has been “safely rebalanced” under the disguise of an “update” of
some kind.
In its place, it gets two actor with great talent,
intensity and risk taking pasts who also are commercially viable and seen as
having enough street credibility to further obscure the reversals: Ethan Hawke
and Laurence Fishburne. Hawke was just
coming off of Training Day, a film much closer in kinship to the
Carpenter original than this mess, while Fishburne had Event Horizon
(reviewed elsewhere on this site) and The Matrix franchise. They are good and give it their best, but
they are fighting a loosing battle that has nothing to do with bad cops. The film is ultimately insidious and at
least we hope they got decent paychecks out of it all.
The 1080p
2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image is a bit of a disappointment, with
cinematographer Robert Gantz going overboard on with the overexposed images to
the point where it becomes another clichéd-looking affair and puts even more
distance between audience and the events as they unfold. The sound here is in Dolby Digital 2.0 with
fairly good Pro Logic surrounds, plus Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 and DTS 5.1 mixes
that are much better at approximating the fullness of the original
soundtrack. Unfortunately, the mix is
more about the battle scenes than character, though dialogue benefits from
this. Extras include three of the
creators on an audio commentary trying to explain this wreck, deleted scenes
that mattered little and five featurettes.
- Nicholas Sheffo
