Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)

Loose remake of the 1976 John Carpenter film of the same title, which admittedly I haven't seen. The film concerns Sergeant Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) an officer traumatized by the death of two associates under his command eight months prior, now its New Years Eve and Roenick along with a small skeleton staff is overseeing the last day of operations of the titular Precinct 13, a police stations in a sparsely populated part of Detroit that is being shuttered due to budget cuts. Roenick is visited by a police psychologist played by Maria Bello who wants to help the officer truly cope with his earlier trauma, plus the two like to flirt. In addition at the precinct there is a grizzled veteran cop played appropriately by Brian Dennehy and a "sexy secretary" played by Drea de Matteo.

A convenient snow storm forces a bus conducting a convenient prisoner transfer to stop and temporarily unload their inmate cargo at Precinct 13 until the storm blows over. Conveniently among them is crime lord Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne) who has just been conveniently arrested and is likely to turn on his erstwhile corrupt cop associates lead by Gabriel Byrne once he meets with the state prosecutor. Byrne and his men are pretty motivated not to let said meeting happen and so they conduct and assault on Precinct 13 to prevent it. Bishop eventually explains to Roenick what this whole siege is really about and the two join forces to defend the precinct with a mixture of police officers, civilians and criminals awkwardly joining together in an effort to save there lives.

This is a pretty good set up, and I like these kinds of 'Alamo-type' 'ragtag band is hopelessly outnumbered' kind of stories, so for me you'd have to be pretty incompetent to mess a film like this up, and fortunately director Jean-Francois Richet is not incompetent, though he really hasn't done much with his career. The cast is solid, they don't have to stretch much for these proceedings, so they can carry the film with little effort. Nothing really exceptional about the film, but there are no major flaws except maybe a little bit towards the end. There are plenty of clichéd 'surprises' but they are forgivable. A quite watchable bit of action. **1/2