As I’m not the kind of cinephile to obsess over the work of a specific director or an actor, I like to judge one’s work for its own merits, not through the lens of my admiration for a particular individual. Nevertheless, my tastes are clearly in phase with John Carpenter’s films.
I can appreciate Halloween, but I don’t care for it. However, my favorite movie is The Thing, I regularly feel the need to rewatch The Fog, They Live, In The Mouth of Madness, or Big Trouble in Little China. And from time to time, I like to revisit Assault on Precinct 13.
The lone inhabitants of an abandoned police station are under attack by the overwhelming numbers of a seemingly unstoppable street gang.
I think that Assault on Precinct 13 is strong when it comes to catching your attention and never letting it go until the end. It starts by establishing that the precinct is empty and will be closed a few hours later. There’s almost nothing left except a freshly promoted lieutenant on his first assignment, two civil employees answering the phones, and a uniformed veteran. Then, you add a few convicts on the road to prison in need of medical attention.
The stage is set in a timely manner. The fact that the city has a violent gang problem is also immediately established. Then, a man just gunned down a kid and her father snapped and got his vengeance without losing a bit, setting in motion what led to the assault on the precinct 13.
Once the little girl is killed, it’s like the air starts to slowly escape and, as the movie progresses, less and less space is available for the characters to continue to breathe. As Carpenter had perfectly established the geography of the movie, the claustrophobia sets in seamlessly.
And yet, some of them never lose their cool. In that regard, convicted criminal Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) is a proto-Snake Plissken, the Cool guy facing life and death the same way, stoically. He just wants a smoke! Anyway, he has the perfect kind of presence for a movie that has little time to develop its characters. We know little about most of them, but it’s enough to hope to see them survive the whole ordeal.
Famously, Assault on Precinct 13 is described as Rio Bravo meets Night of the Living Dead. It’s mostly that, but it’s pure pulp drenched in urban decay with an attitude problem. That sounds glorious if it’s your kind of entertainment. And it is mine. It’s also quite raw, with a dark undertone, some palpable sexual tension, and—most surprisingly—not much violence on screen past a certain point.
Yes, Carpenter hits hard with the opening murders, but the more the assault progresses, the less the violence is bloody. A strange effect, but the corpse becomes as elusive as the assailants. You know they’re here, you share the dread the protagonists feel about their imminent arrival, but they are nothing much than a faceless mob.
It’s smartly done as nobody really knows why they are attacking. The whole zombie thing taken from Night of the Living Dead works because of that apparent lack of concrete motivation. You have an understanding of the situation that this little bunch of survivors never gets.
This could have been used to form some kind of message, a social commentary of sorts, but Assault on Precinct 13 stays simple and, if you are searching for a reading, don’t go further than Napoleon Wilson and his relationships with Lt Bishop (Austin Stoker) and Leigh (Laurie Zimmer). Forced together, they have to show what they are made of, and this becomes a story about people trying to understand each other at the end of the world. They all come from different places, but as they must trust each other and look at a similarly grim end, they find common value in each other. We could say that this is a movie about humanity once all traces of civilization are stripped away and, in that case, it’s quite optimistic.
Anyway, it’s a great siege movie, and overall a really solid film.
