In 2005, the story of Rio Bravo reached its limit. The 1959 Howard Hawks film had been reimagined many times– first by Hawks himself, who retold elements of the story in El Dorado (1966) and in his final film, Rio Lobo (1970), then six years later by Hawks devotee John Carpenter, who turned to Rio Bravo as the inspiration for one of his best films, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976).
Twenty-nine years later, Carpenter’s reimagining of Rio Bravo was, in turn, remade in the form of Jean-François Richet’s Assault on Precinct 13. The 2005 remake oozes with the worst clichés of the period’s action movies: violence without style, unimaginative dialogue on sex, and the uninventive absence of light, seemingly an attempt to remind the viewer of grim the situation endured by the characters, played by a who’s who cast that includes Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne.
But what the 2005 version of Assault on Precinct 13 lacks as an action film, it makes up for as a fascinating study in the art of the remake.
In Rio Bravo, John Wayne plays Sheriff John T. Chance. At the outset of the film, he arrests Joe Burdette, who has just committed a murder in cold blood. Joe is lucky, as he happens to be the brother of wealthy landowner, Nathan, who has committed his resources to breaking Joe out of jail before the federal marshall arrives. Assisting Chance are two deputies: the alcoholic Dude (Dean Martin) and the aging Stumpy (Walter Brennan). To outside eyes, the situation is dire.
The heart of the Rio Bravo story can be summed up in two exchanges. Chance’s incredulous friend Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) asks the sheriff, “A game-legged old man and a drunk. That’s all you got?”
“That’s what I’ve got,” Chance replies. The other comes not too long after, when Chance and Dude must follow a man suspected of killing Wheeler into a saloon. Dude insists on going in the front door. “Think you’re good enough?” Chance asks. “I can find out,” Dude replies.
At its core, the Rio Bravo story is one of redemption. Though Wayne is undoubtedly the star, the story belongs to Martin’s Dude, who overcomes his alcoholism (a byproduct of a broken heart) and proves to his friends and himself that he is, in fact, “good enough.” It’s a refrain that echoes throughout the remakes.
In Carpenter’s film, Napoleon Wilson, a convicted murder, is the one seeking redemption. He finds himself fighting alongside the police to defend the precinct after a street gang murders a young girl in cold blood, and her father kills their leader in revenge and seeks refuge in the precinct. Lieutenant Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) pledges, as a public servant, to protect the man at all costs. Wilson and the police secretary, Leigh (Laurie Zimmer) agree, taking up the task with the kind of professionalism John T. Chance espoused.
“You were good,” Wilson says to Leigh, trying to pay her a compliment after one shootout. “If I’d been any good in here,” she says, pointing to the dead body of a co-worker killed in the crossfire, “maybe she’d still be alive.”
It’s a story with familiar rhythms. A group finds themselves with their backs against the wall, facing down a clear choice between right and wrong. They opt for the right thing, the hard thing, and, in doing so, become all the better for it. And whatever their original reason for fighting becomes second to the commitment they feel to one another.
In both Rio Bravo and the original Assault on Precinct 13, plot is secondary to emotion. The difference, though, is that Hawks’s film is driven more by character. Carpenter is more concerned with style, in capturing a certain urban mania, achieved by placing his story in Los Angeles, and shooting the ruthless villains in the style of Night of the Living Dead (another direct influence) and bringing to the screen a shocking violence to match.

The 2005 Assault on Precinct 13 blends elements of both films in its retelling. The ghost of Dude clings to the air. Dean Martin songs play throughout the radio of the precinct. Sergeant Jake Roenick, the character played by Ethan Hawke, suffers from PTSD after losing two colleagues in the field. He turns to the bottle for support.
But unlike Rio Bravo, the seeds of this trauma, of character, are never given room to develop. Instead, the priority is action, sprinkling in bits of information about the characters into a convoluted plot. Fishburne plays Marion Bishop, an organized crime figure and the Burdette equivalent. Yet the group trying to break into Precinct 13 are not his allies, but corrupt cops who want to kill him so as to avoid exposure. As the film progresses, Bishop also becomes a kind of Chance figure, urging Roenick to carry on and leave behind “self-pity.”
In Rio Bravo, the man they are trying to keep safe in jail is the criminal, Joe Burdette. In Carpenter’s film, it is the shell-shocked father, incapable of movement after the senseless murder of his daughter. But as the films progress, both men drift outside the frame. Burdette is hardly seen. We only catch an occasional glimpse of the father as he lays on the floor. Both films inevitably move away from the reason that brought the gang together, and towards the shared fight they now must survive.
Fishburne as Bishop, by contrast, is a central force in the remake. Powerful. In command. And therein lies a certain problem: the story of Rio Bravo is one of mutual trust, of a shared bond to the single goal in the face of a clear moral question. Never do the defenders of Precinct 13 truly gel together. Never do they come to fully trust one another. Even as the corrupt cops are closing in, the group remains unsure of the others’ allegiances. If they are not invested in one another, why should we be invested in them?
Even by the story’s end, redemption arcs remain woefully incomplete. “I’ll never change,” Bishop says as he flees into the woods, escaping the “good” cops who have come to their rescue. And then comes the line summing up Roenick’s overcoming of trauma. “I didn’t even recognize you tonight,” says precinct secretary Iris (Drea de Matteo). “You were like a whole different badass motherfucker back there.”
“You think so?” Roenick replies. “Well, get used to it.”
A far cry from the gentle endings of Rio Bravo and Carpenter’s film, both of which realize that everyone changes, and that violence is the real condition to overcome. On that last point, I am actually not so sure. But it was while watching the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 that I began to wonder. And so the films began to talk to one another once more.
“Assault on Precinct 13” is available for digital rental or purchase.