United States, 2005Cast: Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Maria Bello, Drea DeMatteo
Director: Jean-François Richet
My Rating: *** / ****
Okay some words prior to the comment. This site haven't seen many updates these last couple of months. Well, my excuse is, i kept true to my words, if you see two new updates regarding of movie right here, then there were indeed only two movies that i saw during the time. I have tried to re-schedule my time-of-the-day. And believe me not, at least on a 7-day week, there were at least two days when i could get my schedule worked on me (i.e wake-up early in the morning, and went to bed rather early at night). Enough chit-chat, on to the movie.
I have seen the original 1976, John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, and surely some of the old-school fan to the original cult, low-budget thriller that brought forth John Carpenter's reputation to its height (it was two years before "Halloween", arguably the most notable, popular movie made by him) would deem me as a heretic by saying that i liked this version more than the original.
What do you need in order to make a good - if not passable - action / adventure movie? For one, testosterone. Not that i'm into those gender-stuff, who favors one gender more than the other (well, some of my friend said that i'm an anti-feminist, but that was another story), but arguably, an action / adventure is always considered to be full of testosterone, an adreline pumper that sometimes made your heart beats at least twice as fast, or doesn't beat at all. Now, this movie, is full of testosterone. At least, it hooked me up to stay on screen on the last sixty-minutes of this movie.
There are many differences between this movie and the original. Mostly it was for the better, thankfully. Furthermore, the only thing that connect this movie with the original was (aside of the title of course) the premise. That is, a bunch of characters trapped inside a building, to be specific, a closing-down police station, against a bunch of other characters surrounded the building with guns, with intention of breaking inside and kill a certain man, and everybody else for being there. The plot was executed rather differently with several twists thrown in, and the characters were a little bit better developed (even though understandably, in an action / adventure movie, characater-developments are often left unattended) given the thirty minutes preambule before the action rushes in.
The movie starts strong.. i was totally unprepared because i was rather expecting something similar from the previous 1976 original version. The scene, even before the opening title rolls, build this center character, an undercover cop turns into a drug-and-alcohol-dependant desk Sergeant late in the movie. I was mumbling to myself, uh-oh, so they decided to build a character this time, at the time i'm not buying, and apparently my instinct proved correct since further into the movie, this central character (played by Ethan Hawke) was always under-the-radar, and most of the time over-shadowed by other strong perfomances.
The scene-stealer of this movie was Laurence Fishburne, who just like Mr.Hugo Weaving suffers from being labeled with the character he played on The Matrix. Ah, yes, the ever cool Morpheus. More often than not, i see a glimpse of Morpheus in his movement on every frame on this movie. I hate it at first, but then rather fell in love with it. I mean how could you not fell in love with his coolness when he pops somebody's head, or in-the-most-interesting-scene when he throws a couple of molotov bombs toward his attacker.
And the villain, ewww an ever irritating bastard, had the movie went a little bit longer, i would tempted to throw something to the screen whenever he makes his appearance. Damn. The guy (John Leguizamo) was a constant irritant, though he would only say a two-or-so line of words, his presence is just simply irritating, and you know you'll hate him even before he steps into the frame. Kudos to the casting director.
The action itself, which of course a main-course for such movie, was good. So good that it doesn't dragged away by overblowing things, or by overloading the volume. It even could pull you in into a horror that felt by the characters trapped in the closed-down Precinct where men with weapons lurking out there, with every intention to break in and shot you in the head.
As for the rest, i was rather disappointed with the absence of the little-girl-with-ice-cream-shot-in-the-chest scene as in the original version. But i was shocked when one of the lovable character shot mercilessly from a close-range.. damn! really i hadn't see it coming, i thought (yes, i was being cheesy) that there'd be a hero, a knight in a shining armor, galloping to the rescue on his blinding white horse. But no, it simply goes bang, and off the character go. And you'd see a lot of deaths here, even the 'good' ones, and obviously most of the 'bad' ones. One thing disturbed me though, this guy who direct this movie, had an obvious love for head-shots. If i hadn't wrong in numbers, i'm counting 6 head-shots (4 with bullet, two with knive), and almost 6 of them ended with the same scene (a camera trailing away from the scene, showing a hole right in the forehead, or the damage of the assault, with the snow beneath it slowly turns red). Two is good, but 6 are just too many. Even for an R-rated movie. But, all in all, i'm enjoying this movie a lot, and probably one of the underlooked, underachieved, and underrated action film in the 2005 (hey, it was even better than the Fantastic Four).
