It happens sometimes in January—pictures without much advance word or studio confidence get dumped into theaters as the also-rans of the big holiday season. But at least once a year something pretty damn good gets lost in the shuffle. Assault on Precinct 13, the new remake of John Carpenter’s no-frills, high-octane police station showdown—itself a remake of Rio Bravo and a film that worked well in 1976 and still holds up today—is such a sleeper.

It’s a New Year’s Eve blizzard, and fallen Detroit cop Jake Roenick (an effectively gaunt Ethan Hawke) is confined to a desk job at a small precinct, just months off a botched drug bust that led to the deaths of his partners. His skeleton crew includes sexed-up secretary Iris (Drea de Matteo) and salty officer Jasper O’ Shea (Brian Dennehy, chewing it up with relish). He also shares an antagonistic flirtation with obsessive-compulsive, court-appointed psychiatrist Alex (Maria Bello, powerful in the film’s best scene) derailed enroute to a New Year’s bash.

Enter a dangerous prisoner transport that makes an emergency stop in the storm, carrying crime lord and mobster Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne, channeling Morpheus in alternately eloquent and silly baritones), Beck (John Leguizamo, going loosey-goosey), Smiley (Ja-Rule) and defiant Anna (Aisha Hinds) the lone, butch woman.

Soon enough the station finds itself under fire by corrupt cops turned sharp-shooting snipers, led by nefarious Marcus Duvall (Gabriel Byrne), who’ll stop at nothing to eliminate Bishop—and the rest of the trapped officers and prisoners—and extinguish a vast police corruption probe to which Bishop holds the key.

The intentionally hyper-violent thriller creates maximum tension in the gritty, close quarters being pelted by confetti-like snow, and the mistrust, shifting alliances and tensions rise in an effectively comic moment where everyone holds their pistol firmly on everyone else. There’s also a funny and sexy scene where Fishburne’s anti-villain coolly nearly seduces De Matteo’s secretary with descriptions of barbarism. The expert climax involves a cat and mouse sniper game set in a snowy forest and director Jean-Francois Richet demonstrates that he understands the value of silence, the only audible sounds being the crunching of fresh snow under footfalls in the darkness.

Expertly crafted with a fine sense of atmosphere, first-rate actors and suspenseful, Assault is an unpretentious, stripped-down hail of artillery and bloody mayhem. It works largely because it’s performed with gusto and smarts by an ensemble of heavyweights clearly having a blast. How often can what’s commonly referred to—sometimes affectionately and sometimes not—as a B-movie, attract this type of talent?

I haven’t seen any other films by Richet, but I know an efficient actioner when I see one, and this surprising film ratchets up considerable suspense without tired digital trickery or an overdose of cool. There are no hip one-liners, no over-the-top showmanship, no wildly unbelievable stunts and no sense that anyone is going through the motions to cash a paycheck. Normally in a film like this, shrewdly positioned as exploitation, the characters are off the shelf, the actors as disposable as the firearms. Not this time. Each actor gets equal screen time in a screenplay that’s able to balance each of them, even when they’re being dispatched at regular intervals. No one gets short shrift.

Efficient, no frills, well-calibrated suspense, Assault on Precinct 13 delivers the action goods. It’s a 109-minute powder keg that keeps going off in your face, equal measures good acting and heavy artillery.