Movie Reviews

Assault on Precinct 13 is an action movie so silly it should be laughable, but it takes itself very seriously and is done in so dark and stylish a manner that it actually works quite well.

It's New Year's Eve, and a load of criminals including America's biggest bad-ass gangster, Marion Bishop (Laurence 'Morpheus' Fishburne), are being transported to a new maximum security prison. Blizzard-like snowfall, however, diverts the transport bus to the decrepit, soon-to-be-closed Precinct 13, where they plan to wait out the storm. The only people working at the precinct are none too happy, as they were planning on celebrating New Year's with empty cells and nothing much else to do; they include young hotshot cop Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke), a nearly-retired Lieutenant (Brian Dennehy), the precinct's secretary (Drea de Matteo), and Jake's snowed-in psychiatrist (Maria Bello).

With the prisoner's locked in their cells, everyone else tries to resume their New Year's festivities -- until a very large group of heavily-armed men begin to show up outside the precinct, dressed in S.W.A.T.-like winter camouflage and bullet-proof vest, and it's not long before they're trying to force their way inside. Who these people are and why they're trying to break into the precinct is best left up to the film itself to explain.

Assault on Precinct 13 isn't really what I'd call a 'blockbuster' action movie, as those kinds of movies often intersperse moments of comedy between various over-the-top action-based set-pieces. Assault, on the other hand, plays things pretty straight and non-comedic, and the action, while still being intense, takes place on a slightly smaller scale. It's still pretty violent though, being an R-rated action movie (we don't get many of those these days); I wonder if the writers sat around and thought about the various ways they could show a character get mortally wounded by a sharp object to the face.

Anyway, I liked it to an extent. It's a silly action movie whose silliness is disguised behind style and grittiness, and I thought it worked. It almost gets another star deducted for the god-awful rap song that plays overtop the end credits, though.