Assault on Precinct 13

At a police station scheduled for closing, the skeleton crew is besieged by a gang determined to get its hands on one of the prisoners in custody. Those are the bare bones of the plot, as in John Carpenter’s 1976 film on which this movie ostensibly is based. But this is a remake in name only; writer James DeMonaco and director Jean-François Richet move the action from sweltering Los Angeles to snowbound Detroit and change the gang from pseudo-revolutionaries to corrupt cops seeking the gangster (Laurence Fishburne) whose testimony threatens them all. Fishburne and Ethan Hawke (as the station’s lead cop) have square-jawed magnetism; too bad they’re not in a better movie. Where Carpenter was lean and economical, DeMonaco and Richet are chaotic and dislocated, overemphasizing the all-too-predictable action.