E-MAIL THE AUTHOR | ARCHIVES

Nocturnal Admissions

By D.K. Holm

January 28, 2005

[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on, and perhaps you should stop reading the Internet.]

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13

Big Trouble in Motor City

There are very few actors who can "do" anger really well.

But those who can will scare the shit out of you.

Lee J. Cobb is the angry patriarch of this select crew, the granddaddy of actorial rage. His successor in this as so many things, is George C. Scott (both appeared in film versions of 12 ANGRY MEN). When these two blow their stack, you really believe it. You envision squads of men in helmets and masks just off camera ready to wrestle them to the ground.

There was a long hiatus of rage actors in the 1960s, curiously, since this was supposed to be the time of the "angry young man," and the same was true with the 1970s. A few good actors had a few good shouting scenes (Jack Nicholson in CARNAL KNOWLEDGE), but for the most part anger wasn't "cool." It required management. Only the Canadian actor Paul Shenar kept up the tradition, as the villain in a series of drive in movies. He had a beautiful bass voice, which appears to have confined him to bad guy roles, up to and including the remake of SCARFACE.

But anger rose again to the surface, as do all pent up emotions. The premiere masters of uncontrolled rage in the 1990s were Kevin Spacey, who first gave vent in the TV series WISEGUY, and the late J. T. Walsh, who did RED ROCK WEST and numerous other films, and who was the subject of a lovely obit by Cintra Wilson at Salon.

There are few if any heirs to the anger actors. In fact right now I can think of only one: Titus Welliver. You may not have heard of him. That is usually the fate of anger actors. They are great in villainous bit parts that burst out strongly and then pass, like a storm cloud, "making" the film, but without getting any of the glory. Because of their rage chops, they tend to be confined to villain parts, always in the shadow of the hero. But you have seen Welliver. You just didn't know it.

Welliver was in the "Darkness Falls" episode of THE X-FILES. He had a few episodes in MURDER ONE's second season, he was a doctor for three seasons of NYPD BLUE, and recently he was in DEADWOOD. On film he was in BLIND JUSTICE, MULHOLLAND FALLS, and BIKER BOYZ. You may have seen him last year as the misogynistic cop who gave Ashley Judd a hard time in TWISTED.

Now he pops up as Milos in the first sequence in the remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. He is part of the backstory that director Jean-Francois Richet and credited writer James DeMonaco impose on John Carpenter's template. Which is that he is background to the plans of Ethan Hawke as Sergeant Jake Roenick to quietly close down the nearly abandoned Precinct 13 (now in Detroit) on New Year's Eve are interrupted by the arrival in a snow storm of a prisoner bus en route to jail bearing one Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne), a gangster whom an elite team of crime fighters led by Gabriel Byrne's Marcus Duvall can't allow to testify.

What was in Carpenter's film a WARRIOR-esque unification of gangs bent on killing the angry white man whose daughter got cut down in crossfire and who was now holed up in the police station under the protection of people who don't even know him is here a coalition of bent coppers trying to mask their criminal proclivities by silencing the guy who can rat them out, which is typical of protestant inclinations of rebellious director Richet, as Jonathan Rosenbaum showed in his recent review of the film. Carpenter's 13, as everyone has noted, was a blend of the stoicism-under-fire found in Howard Hawks and the unrelenting army of faceless foes from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, with the angry white man in the Judith O'Dea role, reduced to catatonia by the third reel. What the new 13 lacks in Howard Hawks it makes up for in Ethan Hawke. That is, while the heroes of the first movie were posing if engaging ciphers, here whole histories have been thought up for the main guys, with Hawke's Roenick a former undercover cop whose bad decisions during a bust cost the lives of his two partners.

His partners' killer was Welliver, as Milos, a man with barely contained rage that he unleashes on his scary pet dog. Welliver is quietly menacing, while Hawke is brilliant, in a scene that could have come out of THE SALTON SEA. But Welliver doesn't last too long, denied the chance to really do an over the top turn of rage.

Now Roenick is doing desk time as the caretaker of a dying police station, along with Brian Dennehy's Jasper O'Shea and Drea De Matteo's Iris, he a parody of the drunken Irish cop, and she the epitome of the bad boy loving secretary with her "party boots" and lust for unreformable criminal elements.

The rest of the film more or less follows Carpenter's lead, with occasional improvements, locally and globally, over the original.

As Rosenbaum points out, making the cops the bad guys shifts the film into a political spectrum, one anathema to Carpenter himself. With the cops the baddies, the film calls into question the drug war, the authenticity of the assigned roles of cops and robbers, and the rush to judgment we make of the criminal classes, humanized in the film by John Lequizamo and others.

Locally, the cops and crooks under siege have more motivation to stick together in this moment of urgency, but that also creates more inherent tensions. Roenick and Bishop have a grudging respect but also a need for each other, a realistic appraisal of each other's strengths and weaknesses, and an unchanging understanding of their social roles, in which they are both imprisoned and liberated. Roenick's complexity is enhanced by the presence of (the ravishing) Maria Bello as a shrink assigned to stage-manage him. Here she has the Nancy Loomis role from the first film, the coward always on the brink of hysteria. However, being a psychiatrist both she and we demand more stability from her, which gives her character added vectors.

Like our esteemed editor Chris Ryall, who wrote about 13 last week, I walked into the film skeptically. But it won me over. Even the final sequence, which does have something of the "reshoot" quality to it, set in unlikely woods near the precinct house, nevertheless plays into the themes built into the film, the tall oaks like prison bars in the precinct basement, a displacement of imprisonment into the natural world at large.

Thus I was doubly disturbed by Stuart Klawans's shortsighted review (on line for subscribers only) review of the movie in THE NATION, first because the movie surprised me, and second, because I esteem Klawans so much.

It seems that Klawans doesn't really like either 13s, though he allows as how the new 13 is "not a terrible movie." And he makes a good point about a French director coming to America to remake with high production values the sort of film the New Wave critic-directors would have esteemed because it ran counter to the "tradition of quality." But still, something about the movie so discombobulated him that he made a few errors and repeated himself on one point twice (within the space of two paragraphs he asks more or less the same question about the fate of Dennehy's character).

He makes a big deal about the supposed lack of clarity of the deaths and their number. Yet the film is very specific about numbers. At one point Byrne's character even adds them all up for the viewer (33 copes versus eight precinct residents under attack). He wonders what happened to Dennehy when it seemed pretty obvious to me that he was laid flat by the flash bomb secreted in his pocket. He wonders if the Matt Craven character is dead or alive in the overturned van when the point of the moment is the joke of de Matteo asking him to play dead. And he asserts that Richet's invention flagged by having too many villains impaled with objects, whereas I can only recall one, a cop whom Roenick kills via icicle fu to the eye (borrowed, by the way, from DIE HARD 2), though I could be wrong about this — I'll have to see it again, with pleasure. On the contrary, the invading hoards (their masking for some reason being an offense to the reviewer) are burned, gassed, shot, and exploded. Their masking makes the paramilitary cops more ominous and, in one case, the mask figures in a bad cop's death.

Worse, Klawans says of the women that, unlike in the first 13, they are "no longer just blond-mopped expanses of thighs and cleavage." This gets the first film totally wrong. For one thing, Laurie Zimmer was a laconic Hawksian character who ensorcelled male viewers and inspired a cult following and a short film about that cult. And in any case, none of the women in Carpenter's film were blonde; all the blondes are in this one. By the way, at one point Klawans says that he is making 13 sound like a bad film, and it isn't; my critique is making Klawans sound like a bad reviewer, and that's not the case.

Finally, I reject his notion that the new 13 is overly, distractingly pretty and visually dynamic. I love the shots of the laser beams searching out those hiding in the smoky precinct, just as I love the long uniting tracking shot of the good and bad guys waiting for the next wave of attack, and the trick shot of Hawke bending before a sink to rise up in the mirror where a camera couldn't possibly really be. Such visual pyrotechnics may not be in the tradition of the Hollywood maudit films the new wavers loved, but they are in the spirit of Hitchcock, whom the new wave also revered.

Don't let your anger at the idea that a masterpiece has been unnecessarily remade prevent you from seeing the new 13. It is a great film and in many ways even better than its progenitor.

DVD DIATRIBE Archives