Repeat Assault, with Vigor

By RICHARD CORLISS

It's New Year's Eve in Precinct 13, and the dozen or so folks inside--cops and perps alike--may not live long enough to watch a bowl game. Outside, a faceless horde is barraging the station with every weapon of destruction short of those not found in Saddam's Iraq, blasting craters in the windows and doors. The good guy in charge has some artillery, but he's short of manpower. One of the prisoners has a suggestion: "Why don't you give me one of those guns, Sergeant? I'll help fend off the black hats." It happens that this Good Samaritan is a black hat--a notorious cop killer. Oh, well, imminent death makes for impromptu comrades. Grab a rifle, pilgrim.

Assault on Precinct 13 is Jean-Fran??ois Richet's remake of the action thriller that John Carpenter made for $100,000 in 1976. The plot imperative of both films is as simple as a shark's: one night, one setting; bad guys outside, good and bad guys in; last one not to get blown up wins. It's your basic claustrophobic nightmare, which theater and cinema have astutely exploited--from Sartre's No Exit and nearly any Pinter play or Roman Polanski movie to the old cliff-hanger serials, where the four walls of a cell would close in on our hero. Anyone under pressure has felt this contraction: the frazzled mind cowering, shrinking, as reality ruthlessly applies the clamps.

Months before the assault, Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) led a botched sting operation that resulted in the deaths of some of his team. Now he is steeped in fear and failure; he has the fretful eyes of a dog awaiting its master's familiar kick. So he can't be surprised when two things go wrong in sleepy Precinct 13. First, a batch of criminals arrives, including assassin Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne). Then all hell breaks loose outside and tries to break in, presumably to spirit Bishop out of custody.

Screenwriter James DeMonaco peoples the precinct with a Grand Hotel's worth of character clich??s: the grizzled patrolman (Brian Dennehy) who's ready to retire; the woman cop (Drea de Matteo) who can out-tough the macho men; the motormouth con (John Leguizamo) who sees ways of escape in the encroaching anarchy. This bunch could start a brawl in a bus line. But they need to become a community fast to fight an enemy whose siege tactics are as unfathomable as they are unstoppable.

The differences between the two Assaults--the new one's pretty good, the old one near great--are of tone, style and perspective. Richet's m??tier is juiced, as edgy as Roenick's psyche; it favors obsessive-compulsive tracking shots and some Dolby rumblings that make the theater shudder like a wooden roller coaster. He gooses the actors to high agitation, except Fishburne, who remains Clyde Cool throughout. Indeed, it seems as if Fishburne is the only member of the company to have learned from the original.

Carpenter, from the first generation of film-school babies, was fusing two favorite old movies: Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, with Sheriff John Wayne and his ragtag deputies holding off a jail raid, and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, in which the zombies attack a house in a cemetery and just keep on coming. He also laced his movie with references to Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Sergio Leone movies. As he did in his next film, the horror hit Halloween, Carpenter broke a few rules, as when he put a cute 10-year-old in and out of peril and then--bang!--killed her off, but his style is classic: lots of three-actor medium shots and hardly a raised voice or drop of sweat in all the bombarding. The cop (Austin Stoker), the killer (Darwin Joston), the woman (Laurie Zimmer)--all are professionals, focused on outliving a hard night's job.

The other difference is the films' choice of enemy. Who's out there in the night? In the new film, it's a specific group (we won't say which) with a motive familiar to readers of cynical crime fiction. In the original, it's an L.A. street gang, but one that metastasizes into a more generalized and troubling plague: the whole roiling sweep of urban pestilence that seized the U.S. in the '70s. It's the rampaging unknown, voiceless and ruthless--a nightmare that will end only if you can stay awake, and alive, till dawn.