The new "Assault on Precinct 13," which stars Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne, is a remake of the old "Assault on Precinct 13," directed by John Carpenter in 1976, two years before he made "Halloween." It should be noted that the old "Precinct 13," a scruffy and unshowily artful exercise in low-budget mayhem, was not altogether new at the time. Its premise - a motley assortment of cops and crooks holding off a brutal, endless siege in a lonely police station - owed a lot to George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) and also to Howard Hawks's "Rio Bravo" (1959).

This is a perfectly respectable pedigree, and I do not mean to suggest that you should avoid the new "Assault on Precinct 13," directed by Jean-Fran?ois Richet from a screenplay by James DeMonaco, because it's a remake. There are plenty of other reasons. The main one is that the movie cruelly and pointlessly squanders the talents and efforts of its cast as it pushes them through a master class in overacting under duress, rewarding the ones who perform best by killing them off first.