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A few years ago I finally got around to watching Falling Down, because I'd heard it was funny, disturbing and thought-provoking; and also because Michael Douglas always has a magnetic screen presence even in bad films (e.g. Basic Instinct and Wall St. Yes, the original Wall St., not the sequel with Shia LaBeouf. Fight me.).
Falling Down, huh. What a weird, insipid and unfunny movie. There's this spree killer who, after years of petty frustrations and disappointments, has snapped, gone postal and is plotting to murder his estranged wife, right? How do we get the audience to identify with him? Why, we'll just have him spout inane observational humour about the petty irritations of modern life in between vicious indiscriminate violence. "What's the deal with fast food chains, amirite guys?" This inane observational humour is never funny, never feels remotely in-character and essentially just feels like it's there to pad out the runtime, but - well, how else are we going to get the audience to sympathize with such an unpleasant character? What, explain his situation and motivations to such a degree that we can understand them even if we don't think his behaviour is justified? Bro, I'm a screenwriter, I'm not Cormac McCarthy.
The thriller parts aren't thrilling, the comedy parts aren't funny, the "satire" falls flat on its face, the plot and how it's depicted is so exaggerated, cartoonish and contrived that you could practically call it a preemptive adaptation of Grand Theft Auto V. Baffling how the filmmakers thought they were making some kind of profound statement about American society, masculinity, consumerism, whiteness etc. Even more baffling how so many critics apparently bought it.
I thought the exact opposite. The protagonist only killed the nazi guy on purpose, and accidentally killed the golfer. You seriously think he was planning to murder his wife? He had no plan; the ending is basically the dog who caught the car. The guy is just a regular guy who lost everything, his job, wife, house, daughter, and everything he might have worked for in his life. When he snaps, he says exactly what he wants: "I'm going home." He's lost everything and wants to cling desperately to the only thing he knows as happiness.
The petty annoyances aren't about the annoyances, but only an emphasis that the protagonist truly has nothing - that not even a single person in the entire city gives a damn about his existence or circumstances, and won't give him an inch of accommodation or an ounce of sympathy. When you have a place in society, the system working as intended is somehow comforting, even the little annoyances. But when you have no place, they just deepen the wound.
The movie isn't a commentary on society or anything, but a story of the protagonist's downfall. He was a regular guy, with a professional job and a family, just like you once, who lost his place. Even as a violent maniac, nobody gives a shit and he's just a piece of trash to be taken out.
Absolutely. He has a severe temper and the reason she left him was because she couldn't tolerate his emotional abuse and the implied threat of violence. The whole movie is him lashing out at the world that denied him the things he felt entitled to (good job, respect). Of course he's going to lash out at the woman who (as he sees it) denied him a stable family. The fact that he abducts the wife and daughter at gunpoint only demonstrates my point.
Its social commentary may not have succeeded, but it was certainly intended. Quote Wikipedia:
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Falling Down is a product of it's time. The kind of observational humor was novel, at that time.
It's been a while, the scene where he's complaining about fast food came at a time when fast food kind of changed (national brands and that kind of advertising were new, etc.). The violence was also (sort of) real; Which was in stark contrast to most action movies at the time...
It was before my time but globalization was kind of new and that type of Regan consumerism was strong back then.
Have you ever seen the movie Gung Ho? It's a comedy but it's cultural context, if that makes any sense.
Uh-huh. Bonus points for the top comment making the exact same GTA comparison I did.
Even Die Hard felt more grounded and believable than this. McClane is a bloody battered wreck by the end of his ordeal, while D-FENS hasn't a scratch on him until he actually gets brought down. And McClane is a cop who deals with hardened criminals every day, while D-FENS is an office drone who's never seen combat, and yet effortlessly mows down Compton gangbangers without a second's hesitation. Whatever Falling Down is, it's not "realistic". I don't even think it was really trying to be.
No I haven't. Does it have a similar plot?
Are you really going to ignore the rest of the sentence?
Right, and I contrasted it with an action movie which came out 5 years earlier which was, to my mind, far more grounded and realistic in its presentation. Likewise The Fugitive, which came out the same year.
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From what I’ve heard of the martial capabilities of gangbangers, this may be the least unrealistic part of a white collar office drone resorting to violence- it seems like an average 100+ IQ person less than 30 pounds overweight can significantly outperform even relatively hardened and experienced violent criminals by watching enough YouTube videos to avoid stupid mistakes and going to the range once or twice.
Sure, but YouTube didn't exist in 1993, and I don't think we're given any reason to believe that D-FENS has had any shooting practice prior to his rampage.
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This isn't a great example; reality is just weird. Socially, muggers often expect victims to follow a script (for good reason! victims are almost never carrying anything worth enough to risk their lives to try and keep it!) and whenever someone doesn't follow the script it can leave assailants completely non-plussed. So, "when mugging a Dilbert-lookalike, pulling one knife is enough" isn't too unrealistic a mugging plan. Physically, many fights really are essentially over in seconds, because humans are squishy and weak and just one deep cut or bad impact can be quickly incapacitating. So when "Dilbert" gets in the first hit with an unexpected baseball bat to the skull, "run" isn't too unrealistic a plan B.
Yeah, the rocket launcher from a random military surplus store (and the random little boy who knows how to use it!) was a much better example of this. Not impossible; "gang bust seizes rocket launcher" seems to be a headline every few years, including in LA. But clearly this one existed in the service of plot escalation rather than plot consistency.
An office drone with no combat training managing to overcome a mugger or muggers through quick thinking and a stroke of good luck? I can swallow that.
But the same man then
over the course of a few hours, all without being injured in any way or intercepted by the police (despite making no effort to hide his appearance and exposing his face to dozens if not hundreds of eyewitnesses). Part of the reason he fails to get intercepted by the police is because he just so happened to walk into a military surplus store owned by a man who has heard about his exploits on the radio and arrived at the erroneous conclusion that the man's exploits were motivated by racial hatred, and hence decided to protect the man from the police even if doing so made him an accessory after the fact.
No part of this plot passes the smell test.
Individual parts do, but not together. That's my main objection to Falling Down - even at his most restrained and grounded, Joel Schumacher is still too over the top to make a believable film for me. That he went on to make Batman Forever and Batman and Robin should have surprised nobody.
I'll admit that Phone Booth is something of a guilty pleasure, in large part because I saw it when I was 11 or 12 and watching it feels nostalgic. The plot is rather contrived (even more so than Falling Down, arguably), but it has no pretensions to social commentary, the dialogue is funny, the real-time splitscreen gimmick is well-executed, the acting is solid across the board (pretty impressive that Kiefer Sutherland has to more or less carry the movie by himself without appearing onscreen for 90 minutes, and he pulls it off) and the pace never flags.
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It's a dumb romp, and has a cult following in certain online circles (*chans, in particular). However, I found it to be a contrived sort of controlled venting for the audience the scriptwriters anxiously worried they might attract - who are allowed to feel anger at petty frustrations and disappointments, as you say, and vicariously enjoy and empathize with the aimless retaliatory spree killing, but must be made to stop short where the film draws a very firm boundary fencing in that anger as illustrated in the Army Navy store scene, when Michael Douglas' character pushes back against its truly radical (and bigoted) owner, stating "I'm an American, you're a sick asshole."
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