Remake of the John Carpenter shoestringer of 1976, about an armed siege on a police station à la the Alamo. But the revised plot, just to give the new team of filmmakers some Creative Input, has been altered for minimum interest and sense. The besiegers are no longer an insatiable street gang, but are now policemen themselves, the members of the elite Organized Crime and Racketeering unit, bent on snuffing out an incarcerated cop killer not because he has killed a cop but because he can blow the whistle on their collusion with him. It takes all the terror out of the terrorism. A specific goal, a quenchable bloodthirst, an air of reason. And surely a squad of policemen could gain easier entry to a police station than by stealth and by force. Further plot twists tie themselves up in nonsense. (The "inside" man would have had numberless opportunities to put an end to the siege, even before it began.) Still, the movie is not unbearable. It moves right along, under the imported director, Jean-François Ricochet. (Whose French heritage, however, does not guarantee he will partake in Carpenter's hommages to that auteurist treasure, Rio Bravo.) The action is rough and ruthless, if at times a bit idiotic. The snowstorm effects — for Detroit on New Year's Eve — are evocative. And there are good contributions from Laurence Fishburne, authoritatively menacing as the cop killer, John Leguizamo as a comic-relief junkie, Maria Bello as a police psychologist with an obsessive-compulsive disorder of her own, and Drea de Matteo as a hot-to-trot police secretary. Ethan Hawke, on the other hand, is in the lead. Reason enough for desertion. With Brian Dennehy, Ja Rule, Gabriel Byrne. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd