Assault on Precinct 13
With Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, John Leguizamo, Gabriel Byrne, Maria Bello, Brian Dennehy, Drea de Matteo, and Ja Rule
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
After most of the employees of a police station in a Los Angeles ghetto have moved to a new building, the station is attacked by a vengeful gang that uncannily expands into a mob, to the accompaniment of Carpenter’s relentlessly minimalist, percussive synthesizer score. A black rookie named Bishop and two white secretaries are the only remaining staff, and once Bishop realizes they can’t survive without help, he frees two prisoners, one black, one white–both hardened criminals en route to the state pen. More improbably, the four gang members who first attack the station are of different races and ethnicities, though they quickly metamorphose into a faceless collective monster of no clear race or ethnicity–making it easier for us to accept the indiscriminate slaughter of one of them after another as they try to climb through the windows. Following Hawks’s ethic of relativity, virtually everyone inside turns out to be a good guy in some way, and almost everyone outside either proves to be evil or gets killed. As Dave Kehr put it in the Reader’s capsule review, the movie’s “short on motivation but long on paranoia.”
Carpenter’s movie is a very efficient thriller, but its efficiency depends on our acceptance of the legitimacy of authority. The impact of this movie is predicated on the illegitimacy of authority. Director Jean-Francois Richet, who grew up in one of the projects on the outskirts of Paris, shot his first feature, Etat des lieux (1995), on a $20,000 budget, which he’d accumulated by gambling his unemployment check at a local casino. But he’s better known for Ma 6-T va crack-er (1997), an explosive and eclectic feature whose title is translated in Universal’s press notes for Assault as Crack City, though “My 6-T Goes Bang” seems more accurate and more appropriate. It depicts a series of violent skirmishes between the police and some young people who live in the projects, and it too qualifies as a war film.
