It's New Year's Eve in Detroit and Precinct 13 is being decommissioned. The skeleton crew, led by Sergeant Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) are bedded down, ready to party the night away when they receive a last-minute bus full of prisoners thanks to a snowstorm. Among the handcuffed is crime boss and cop killer Marion Bishop (Lawrence Fishburne). Before the ball can drop, a group of masked men surrounds the precinct and demands that Bishop be turned over to them. Initially fearing the crime boss' goons, Jake soon realizes that the assailants are cops, aiming to silence Bishop before he can testify against them. Jake has to rally his little band of survivors to defend the building until help can arrive at dawn.This is a remake of a John Carpenter film from the 70's. I haven't seen the original but I remember seeing this one in theaters. I will forever remember it because it was the same day I watched Schindler's List and I started to get a little twitchy about people getting shot in the head. Not run-screaming-from-the-theater twitchy, but I flinched more than I normally would.
This movie is hyper-violent pretty much from start to finish. It's kind of awesome. Some of the insider paranoia gets a bit wearying but then someone gets shot or something blows up and it's fine. I'm not sure why Gabriel Byrne and Brian Dennehy got left off the cover but they're both in this, as well as a bunch of people you'd know by sight if not by name.
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