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Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) (HD DVD)
Universal // R // May 9, 2006 // Region 0
List Price: $34.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
It's New Year's Eve in Detroit, and just as 2004 is coming to a close, so is the remote, rundown Precinct 13 station. All calls are being routed elsewhere, 
and there are only a few stragglers manning the soon-to-be-closed station: fishnetted hosebag secretary Iris (Drea de Matteo), an Irish cop stereotype on the verge of retirement (Brian Dennehy), and Sgt. Roenick (Ethan Hawke), a desk jockey who's still reeling from the butchering of his team eight months earlier. They're expecting a quiet farewell, but a snowstorm redirects a prison transport bus their way, and Roenick and company have to play host for a jittery junkie, a gangbanger who won't stop crying foul, a thug peddling cheap knockoff merch, and quietly fierce, cop-killing gangster Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne). Almost precisely at the stroke of midnight, the precinct is surrounded by a small army of heavily armed killers who mount a siege to butcher Bishop and anyone who's come in contact with him. Outmanned and outgunned, Roenick arms the prisoners, and good guys and bad are forced to strike an unlikely alliance.
I liked Assault on Precinct 13 the first time I saw it, and I know that sounds like the lead-in to some sort of half-witty quip like "...when John Carpenter made it twenty years ago!", but nope. It struck me as one of the more entertaining action flicks of the past few years, serving up a couple of unexpected twists, a massive body count, unflinchingly vicious kills, and a claustrophobic sense of tension. The plot's thin and contrived, and its characters aren't exactly richly drawn, but the actors and action successfully overshadowed most of those shortcomings. Assault on Precinct 13 is the sort of movie I watch, enjoy, and immediately forget about.
Assault... doesn't hold up at all to a second viewing, though. Too many characters grated on my nerves, especially Ja Rule's dumbass Smiley
relentlessly referring to himself in the third-person ("Smiley don't like this shit! Smiley's scared up in this piece! Murder!"; not an actual quote) and skanky secretary Iris continually reminding everyone in earshot that she screws 'n smokes 'n screws some more. John Leguizamo plays a rambling, paranoid junkie, a character whose defining trait is that he's annoying as hell. The pacing seemed to breeze along the first time I saw Assault on Precinct 13, but with a second look, any scene without gunplay drags. Too much of the dialogue made me cringe, like Bishop's faux-intellectual comparison between sex and death (at least he went the Greek route and didn't make the stale "le petite morte" reference). The movie takes pains to mention how remote the precinct is, buried in a industrial park that's all but abandoned because of the holidays -- the sort of place where you could have a helicopter flying overhead, an exploding bus, and six hour long sprays of machine gun fire without raising anyone's suspicions -- but there's also one of Detroit's legendary sprawling forests nearby for an out-of-place cat-and-mouse climax. I'd have thought the climax of a movie titled Assault on Precinct 13 would take place in...y'know, Precinct 13. I could bitch for another paragraph or two, but you get the general idea.
Don't think. Just watch, and just watch once. Jean-François Richet's remake of Assault on Precinct 13 is disposably mindless fun, but catch it on cable or toss it in your Netflix queue.
Video: Assault on Precinct 13 is a nice looking disc,
falling somewhere just above average compared to the other HD DVDs I've watched to date. The photography is heavily stylized and processed, and that visual flair can dull the 'wow' factor of high definition a bit, especially in the softer, warmer shots in the precinct before the siege. Quite a bit of the movie after that point takes place in low light, and accordingly, black levels are typically strong throughout, though a handful of shots lean more towards a dark navy blue. I still found myself impressed throughout by the sharpness and level of detail, even in scenes that are seemingly uneventful visually, such as the full texture of Laurence Fishburne's facial skin on full display in a medium shot early on and the detailed, almost three dimensional appearance of snow on the ground. The source material is as clean as you'd expect from a 2005 theatrical release, and the fine-grained texture of the film emerges without any concerns.
I noticed that the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 was airing on Cinemax-HD at the same time I was reviewing this HD DVD, giving me a chance to compare the two. The 1.78:1 presentation on Cinemax was cropped in 3 of the 4 scenes I compared, although the fourth scene opened the mattes a bit on the top and bottom of the frame. At least through my admittedly not-so-hot cable provider, the image also suffered from some noticeable artifacting and, as sharp as it seemed to be before doing a direct comparison, wasn't nearly as crisp or clear as the HD DVD. Assault on Precinct 13 is the kind of movie I'd would normally suggest watching in high-definition on cable/satellite -- it's already being piped into your house anyway, so why not? -- but the improved presentation on the HD DVD is worth the extra couple of bucks for a rental.
Audio: Assault on Precinct 13 offers the seemingly standard assortment of Dolby Digital Plus tracks and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish. If you have one of the early Toshiba decks, aren't using the six-channel analog outputs, and would prefer not to mess with the player's DTS downmix, a proper DTS 5.1 track is also offered. I believe that's a first for the format, although I'm not sure I see the point. The Dolby Digital Plus track sounds awfully nice in the firefights, with gunfire whizzing from speaker to speaker and the resulting debris tumbling into different channels. The bass wasn't consistently booming throughout, but the Big Action Movie megaton explosions and gunfire roar from the subwoofer, and it's worth noting that neither the effects nor the score drown out any of the film's dialogue. The score, incidentally, is fairly traditional and
isn't the mix of rap, techno, or mallcore metal you might expect. The audio doesn't have that indefinable extra something to push it from 'good' to 'great', but like the video, it's still better than average.
Supplements: Another batch of carryovers are ported from last summer's DVD. A sizeable chunk of the half hour's worth of featurettes seem kinda promotional and lightweight, and although some of them cover the movie's massive arsenal, the set design of the precinct, and some of the dangerous stuntwork, they're too short to really delve much in depth. A brief assortment of deleted scenes with optional audio commentary are also provided, mostly adding in some additional characterization/bickering and most memorably fleshing out Duvall, the little-seen character played by Gabriel Byrne. These extras are all fairly ordinary, and the same goes for the audio commentary with director Jean-François Richet, writer James DeMonaco, and producer Jeffrey Silver. Lotsa chatter about the differences between the remake and Carpenter's original. Very thick French accent. Comments on the film's visual approach and assorted technical notes. Lotsa praise for each other. Average but perfectly fine.
Conclusion: I doubt un-rewatchable is an actual word, but after sitting through this remake of Assault on Precinct 13 a second time, I'm starting to think it should be. Rent It.
Please note that the images in this review are promotional stills lifted from the movie's official website. They're just meant to be eye candy and aren't indicative of the way this HD DVD looks.
and there are only a few stragglers manning the soon-to-be-closed station: fishnetted hosebag secretary Iris (Drea de Matteo), an Irish cop stereotype on the verge of retirement (Brian Dennehy), and Sgt. Roenick (Ethan Hawke), a desk jockey who's still reeling from the butchering of his team eight months earlier. They're expecting a quiet farewell, but a snowstorm redirects a prison transport bus their way, and Roenick and company have to play host for a jittery junkie, a gangbanger who won't stop crying foul, a thug peddling cheap knockoff merch, and quietly fierce, cop-killing gangster Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne). Almost precisely at the stroke of midnight, the precinct is surrounded by a small army of heavily armed killers who mount a siege to butcher Bishop and anyone who's come in contact with him. Outmanned and outgunned, Roenick arms the prisoners, and good guys and bad are forced to strike an unlikely alliance. I liked Assault on Precinct 13 the first time I saw it, and I know that sounds like the lead-in to some sort of half-witty quip like "...when John Carpenter made it twenty years ago!", but nope. It struck me as one of the more entertaining action flicks of the past few years, serving up a couple of unexpected twists, a massive body count, unflinchingly vicious kills, and a claustrophobic sense of tension. The plot's thin and contrived, and its characters aren't exactly richly drawn, but the actors and action successfully overshadowed most of those shortcomings. Assault on Precinct 13 is the sort of movie I watch, enjoy, and immediately forget about.
Assault... doesn't hold up at all to a second viewing, though. Too many characters grated on my nerves, especially Ja Rule's dumbass Smiley
relentlessly referring to himself in the third-person ("Smiley don't like this shit! Smiley's scared up in this piece! Murder!"; not an actual quote) and skanky secretary Iris continually reminding everyone in earshot that she screws 'n smokes 'n screws some more. John Leguizamo plays a rambling, paranoid junkie, a character whose defining trait is that he's annoying as hell. The pacing seemed to breeze along the first time I saw Assault on Precinct 13, but with a second look, any scene without gunplay drags. Too much of the dialogue made me cringe, like Bishop's faux-intellectual comparison between sex and death (at least he went the Greek route and didn't make the stale "le petite morte" reference). The movie takes pains to mention how remote the precinct is, buried in a industrial park that's all but abandoned because of the holidays -- the sort of place where you could have a helicopter flying overhead, an exploding bus, and six hour long sprays of machine gun fire without raising anyone's suspicions -- but there's also one of Detroit's legendary sprawling forests nearby for an out-of-place cat-and-mouse climax. I'd have thought the climax of a movie titled Assault on Precinct 13 would take place in...y'know, Precinct 13. I could bitch for another paragraph or two, but you get the general idea. Don't think. Just watch, and just watch once. Jean-François Richet's remake of Assault on Precinct 13 is disposably mindless fun, but catch it on cable or toss it in your Netflix queue.
Video: Assault on Precinct 13 is a nice looking disc,
falling somewhere just above average compared to the other HD DVDs I've watched to date. The photography is heavily stylized and processed, and that visual flair can dull the 'wow' factor of high definition a bit, especially in the softer, warmer shots in the precinct before the siege. Quite a bit of the movie after that point takes place in low light, and accordingly, black levels are typically strong throughout, though a handful of shots lean more towards a dark navy blue. I still found myself impressed throughout by the sharpness and level of detail, even in scenes that are seemingly uneventful visually, such as the full texture of Laurence Fishburne's facial skin on full display in a medium shot early on and the detailed, almost three dimensional appearance of snow on the ground. The source material is as clean as you'd expect from a 2005 theatrical release, and the fine-grained texture of the film emerges without any concerns. I noticed that the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 was airing on Cinemax-HD at the same time I was reviewing this HD DVD, giving me a chance to compare the two. The 1.78:1 presentation on Cinemax was cropped in 3 of the 4 scenes I compared, although the fourth scene opened the mattes a bit on the top and bottom of the frame. At least through my admittedly not-so-hot cable provider, the image also suffered from some noticeable artifacting and, as sharp as it seemed to be before doing a direct comparison, wasn't nearly as crisp or clear as the HD DVD. Assault on Precinct 13 is the kind of movie I'd would normally suggest watching in high-definition on cable/satellite -- it's already being piped into your house anyway, so why not? -- but the improved presentation on the HD DVD is worth the extra couple of bucks for a rental.
Audio: Assault on Precinct 13 offers the seemingly standard assortment of Dolby Digital Plus tracks and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish. If you have one of the early Toshiba decks, aren't using the six-channel analog outputs, and would prefer not to mess with the player's DTS downmix, a proper DTS 5.1 track is also offered. I believe that's a first for the format, although I'm not sure I see the point. The Dolby Digital Plus track sounds awfully nice in the firefights, with gunfire whizzing from speaker to speaker and the resulting debris tumbling into different channels. The bass wasn't consistently booming throughout, but the Big Action Movie megaton explosions and gunfire roar from the subwoofer, and it's worth noting that neither the effects nor the score drown out any of the film's dialogue. The score, incidentally, is fairly traditional and
isn't the mix of rap, techno, or mallcore metal you might expect. The audio doesn't have that indefinable extra something to push it from 'good' to 'great', but like the video, it's still better than average. Supplements: Another batch of carryovers are ported from last summer's DVD. A sizeable chunk of the half hour's worth of featurettes seem kinda promotional and lightweight, and although some of them cover the movie's massive arsenal, the set design of the precinct, and some of the dangerous stuntwork, they're too short to really delve much in depth. A brief assortment of deleted scenes with optional audio commentary are also provided, mostly adding in some additional characterization/bickering and most memorably fleshing out Duvall, the little-seen character played by Gabriel Byrne. These extras are all fairly ordinary, and the same goes for the audio commentary with director Jean-François Richet, writer James DeMonaco, and producer Jeffrey Silver. Lotsa chatter about the differences between the remake and Carpenter's original. Very thick French accent. Comments on the film's visual approach and assorted technical notes. Lotsa praise for each other. Average but perfectly fine.
Conclusion: I doubt un-rewatchable is an actual word, but after sitting through this remake of Assault on Precinct 13 a second time, I'm starting to think it should be. Rent It.
Please note that the images in this review are promotional stills lifted from the movie's official website. They're just meant to be eye candy and aren't indicative of the way this HD DVD looks.
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