An average movie

John Carpenter’s movies have always been appreciated by the remakers and, so far, already 4 of his classics have been remade (‘The Thing’, ‘The Fog’, ‘Halloween’ and of course ‘Assault on Precinct 13’) . However, this time, if I’m not mistaken, Carpenter picked up the director himself and chose Jean-Francois Richet, a rather unknown French director at least abroad who made some solid flicks in France so I was really curious to see the end-result. Unfortunately, it is quite common for European or Foreign directors to make their debut in America with a remake and, usually, the outcome is pretty disappointing. And indeed, unfortunately for Richet, his American debut was far from being impressive, I’m afraid. I have to confess, I first saw this remake and then many years later, the original version made by Carpenter but after seeing the real thing, the issue with this remake was even more obvious. In my opinion, the first version was pretty good but nothing really amazing but, above all, most of the choice made concerning this flick were made because there was basically not enough money and to remake this with a budget ten times bigger didn’t make much sense. The fact that it looked cheap made it in fact more appealing and it was definitely part of its charm. Furthermore, this time, they modified the plot and basically removed the darker tone, the political/sociological message and instead, they gave us some rather standard action fare with some really annoying multiple twists. I’ll give you that, there was a pretty neat cast (Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Gabriel Byrne, Maria Bello, Drea de Matteo, John Leguizamo) but, a part from that, there was not much to enjoy with this remake. To conclude, I thought it was a rather disappointing action flick and it is not really worth a look in my opinion.

5/10