Falling down

Year of release : 1993

Run time : 1h55m

Genre : Thriller

Cast : Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey

Director : Joel Schumacher

The movie opens with an unsettling close-up of Michael Douglas’ face. His character, William Foster, loses patience when he’s stuck in traffic on a hot day in Los Angeles, waiting for the road to clear, as workers are working on it. He just gets out of his car, and leaves it in traffic.

Sergeant Martin Prendergast from Downtown Robbery is stuck in the same lane, a few cars behind him. He gets out of the car to help a traffic police officer push the car off the road. It’s his last day as a cop, as his wife fears for his life whenever he leaves home for work being close to having panic attacks.

Foster calls his ex wife from a payphone, but when she finally answers he doesn’t speak, and hangs up. Wanting to call again, and not having any change, he goes to a Korean store, but the man doesn’t want to give him change unless he buys something. He gets angry as what he wants to buy is not enough change to be able to use the payphone, and because the Korean man he talks to doesn’t speak English well. He ends up trashing his store with the baseball bat the man had behind the counter, and in the end paying less for the drink, so he could have the change he wants, and leaves.

Foster calls his ex wife again, but the line is busy, as she talks on the phone about their daughter’s birthday party.

Resting on a hill, putting newspaper pages inside his torn shoe, 2 gang members pick on him, saying he needs to pay them for trespassing on their territory. They want his briefcase, so he takes it, along with the baseball bat he took from the store, and beats them with it, making them run away. He drops the bat, and takes the knife one of the gang members had.

The Korean man goes to Prendergast’s office complaining about Foster attacking him and destroying his store.

The gang members got their friends and are looking for Foster to sho0t him in a drive by sho0ting. They see him making another call, but they miss, sho0ting 2 innocent people.

Foster finally talks to his wife, telling her he’s coming home for their daughter’s birthday, but she has a restraining order on him. So she calls the police fearing for their lives.

The gang members end up in a car crash, and Foster goes to their car, taking their bag with guns.

Prendergast’s captain is trying to make him change his mind about retiring, asking if it’s about him being shot in the line of duty a while back, because now he’s working behind a desk. Prendergast doesn’t want to change his mind, and tells him his little daughter died, when asked, so he has no kids.

At the police station, the girlfriend of one of the gang members describes the man the gang members were after, and Prendergast hears it, realizing it’s the same man the Korean man complained about.

Going to a fast food restaurant, Foster gets angry because it’s 11:30 and they just stopped serving breakfast. So, he asks for breakfast using the guns in his bag, scaring everyone. He decides he doesn’t want breakfast anymore, and then complains about the menu, for it doesn’t look like in the pictures.

Prendergast is having lunch with his colleague, who is trying to convince him not to retire. She is taken back to work by her partner, as there’s been a call about a man sho0ting a fast food store. Hearing about it, Prendergast thinks it’s the same man from all the other places, and even maps his path.

Foster buys a snow globe for his daughter, and enters a clothing store to buy shoes. The man there recognizes him from the description on the police radio, and when Prendergast’s colleague goes in to asks if he saw a man matching his description he lies he didn’t.

The man seems to be a racist, hating everybody for different reasons. He ends up fighting Foster for not having the same values and ideas as him. Foster overpowers him by stabbing him, sho0ting him after, and takes the rocket launcher he gave him.

Prendergast thinks it’s a man who lost his mind, going on a rampage through the city, but nobody wants to listen to him because he is retiring. His colleague finally listens to him, and takes him to the Korean store. Prendergast realizes it’s close to the place where he was stuck in traffic in the morning, and it’s the same man who left his car in traffic. He remembers the car plate “D-Fense”, and that’s how they get his name.

I personally enjoyed the movie. Foster is a man who’s had enough of being treated bad, of doing everything right, but being treated bad. He somehow manages to meet a lot of people in his path that pick on him for no reason, so he loses his temper, as he’s already on edge.

Prendergast finds out Foster lost his job the month before, adding to his mental state.

His wife was afraid of him, saying he had a temper, and so was his mother, who was afraid to enter his room!

Prendergast’s wife was annoying. At first I thought she feared for his life, also considering what happened to their daughter, but I think she was just a bit off, she didn’t seem to have a job, and just wanted him to stay home with her. It also seems maybe he always did as she wanted, not wanting to upset her, and it went to her head.

The acting was good from everyone involved.

The soundtrack was good.

The movie received positive reviews from the critics and the audiences of Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB and Metacritic, and grossed 96 million dollars at the box office, against a 25 million budget.

Cinema Score audiences graded the movie a B.

The movie developed a cult following, and even the German rock band Rammstein dressed as the character Foster, for their 2004 Reise Reise album art.

Rating : Worth a watch !