Product Description

MICHAEL DOUGLAS IS A LAID-OFF DEFENSE WORKER WHO GOES ON A VIOLENT RAMPAGE ACROSS LOS ANGELES WITH DOGGED COP ROBERT DUVALL IN PURSUIT. SPECIAL FEATURES: INTERACTIVE MENUS, SCENE ACCESS, AND THEATRICAL TRAILER. SUBTITLES IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9189 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 1999-10-26
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, French
• Dubbed in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 113 minutes

Amazon.com
This film, about a downsized engineer (Michael Douglas) who goes ballistic, triggered a media avalanche of stories about middle-class white rage when it was released in 1993. In fact, it's nothing more than a manipulative, violent melodrama about one geek's meltdown. Douglas, complete with pocket protector, nerd glasses, crewcut, and short-sleeved white shirt, gets stuck in traffic one day near downtown L.A. and proceeds to just walk away from his car--and then lose it emotionally. Everyone he encounters rubs him the wrong way--and a fine lot of stereotypes they are, from threatening ghetto punks to rude convenience store owners to a creepy white supremacist--and he reacts violently in every case. As he walks across L.A. (now there's a concept), cutting a bloody swath, he's being tracked by a cop on the verge of retirement (Robert Duvall). He also spends time on the phone with his frightened ex-wife (Barbara Hershey). Though Douglas and Duvall give stellar performances, they can't disguise the fact that, as usual, this is another film from director Joel Schumacher that is about surface and sensation, rather than actual substance. --Marshall Fine

From The New Yorker
A crude vigilante picture disguised as social satire. The conceit is that American society is rigged against the average guy, and the movie means to entertain us with the spectacle of Joe Normal's revenge on his enemies-that is, on both those who are beneath him and those who are above him on the class scale. The middle-class hero (played with monotonous intensity by Michael Douglas) walks away from his car in a freeway traffic jam and sets out to cross Los Angeles on foot, arming himself as he goes-first with a baseball bat wrestled away from a Korean grocer, and later with artillery abandoned by gang members-and everyone who gets in his way winds up paying a price, from employees in a fast-food restaurant to fat-cat golfers. The movie evokes the self-pitying "silent majority" rhetoric of the Nixon era: that appalling sentimentality about one's own beleaguered and underappreciated virtue. It's no small feat to turn a sociopath into a martyr, but the director, Joel Schumacher, and the screenwriter, Ebbe Roe Smith, are up to the challenge. Also with Robert Duvall, Rachel Ticotin, Barbara Hershey, Frederic Forrest, and Tuesday Weld (floundering in a cruelly conceived role.) The ugly cinematography is by Andrzej Bartkowiak. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

A must-see!
This film is absolutely mesmerizing. Michael Douglas snaps one day and goes wandering through Los Angeles. I think it's interesting when you read reviews on this movie from people in the midwest who don't get this movie. People in L.A. on the other hand certainly do get it. I can tell you from personal experience of living there and being held at gun point by scumbags that anyone could be pushed over the edge in LA. I found this movie to be laugh-out-loud funny especially when Michael Douglas orders a "Whammy Burger" and when he tries out his rocket launcher after an argument with a Cal-Trans employee. "There's nothing wrong with the road, but I'll give you something to fix." I don't think people outside of LA can appreciate that scene as much. And watching Michael Douglas on that golf course had my side hurting for days from painful laughter. Yes, it's sick but the way he looks down at the old guy and says, "And now you're going to die...with that silly hat on", was fantastic. And how about the scene with the white supremist? If you think this movie had too many stereotypes, then you've never been to LA. It's a sick place with sick people where sick things happen. Yes, it's awful that people get shot, but a lot of people in LA deserve what happens to them which this film boldy proves. Studies have shown that the combination of stress, traffic jams, and smog can make someone lose it. What's the point? The point is you should appreciate wherever you live as long as it's not there. Michael Douglas should have got an Oscar for his performance. This was the best movie of the year although it's obviously not for all tastes.

Most engaging film Schumacher's done
Movie Critics are morons. All of these characters ARE stereotypes, as are the characters in 85% of Hollywood's movies today. Panning this movie for it's blatent use of these cliched people kind of misses 'the point' they were looking for. People are ugly, racist, and selfish. This man (with serious emotional problems) takes a look around his world (downtown LA) and slowly begins breaking down. How many of us can identify with the idea of the American Dream gone wrong? Being menaced by a gang? Being lied to by advertising? 'they lie to everybody'. Micheal Douglas portrayal of a Joe Blow gone bad is mesmerizing. Unlike 'Payback', I actually found myself rooting for the 'bad guy'. What Douglas does is ugly, what we all see everyday is ugly. Robert Duvall (as mentioned before) is rock solid.

The DVD's main benefit is crystal clear audio and video. It features scene selection and the trailer. Had it included a few extras (Like a MD or RD commentary track, I'd rate it a 5). This movie is about the 'average man' in a cruddy world who can't take it anymore. He could have been someone you worked with, or saw when you're getting off the bus, or waitied in line behind. And THAT was the point of this movie.

A film that really leaves its mark on you
This is a powerful film, but I personally don't look at it as some type of social commentary or condemnation of modern society, although it certainly touches on some of the problems that will always exist among human beings. Falling Down may well have a potent effect on anyone watching it, though. It always leaves me feeling really, really weird because it touches on so many things we all have to put up with each day, presents a monster whom I can't help but sympathize with in some degree, provides us with a hero whose own life is rife with undeserved problems, and runs its course atop a strong undercurrent of sadness. Michael Douglas gives one of his better performances as Bill Foster, an unremarkable man who finds his world torn apart and finally just snaps. He has lost his wife and little girl (which is his own fault); he's lost his job, the one thing that made him feel important; he just wants things to be like they used to be. He doesn't want to sit in traffic with no air conditioning or pay almost a dollar for a little can of soda or see plastic surgeons living the life of Riley while he can't even support his little girl. His journey "home" is an extraordinary one, and the kinds of awful people he encounters on the way do nothing to help his mentality. It's hard not to cheer him on when he manages to effect an escape from a couple of gangsters trying to rob him, but acts such as holding a burger joint up just because they refuse to serve him breakfast after lunch time is, obviously, way out there. No matter what terrible things he does, though, I can't get completely past the fact that he earnestly wants to see his little girl and give her a present for her birthday; in a clearly psychotic way, I find this movie somewhat touching, and that only makes the whole experience more depressing than it already is.

Robert Duvall is indeed quite good as the good cop, Prendergast, pursuing this vigilante on his last day before retirement. His life is no dream either, but of course he handles his own problems in a way quite unlike our man Foster does. His wife is clearly disturbed, made frighteningly burdensome and vulnerable by the death of their own little girl and an earlier wounding of her husband on the job. For her benefit, he took a desk job and is forced to put up with a lot of jokes and insults from his fellow cops, including his own boss. Except for his partner, all of the cops in this film are as unfeeling and cruel as some of the shady characters Foster meets up with during his journey home, and that is to me one of the more disturbing aspects of this film.

One of the things I liked most about Falling Down was its attempt to portray Foster as one very disturbed man and not a stand-in for any type of stereotypical vigilante; one character in particular makes this point quite clearly when, discovering that Foster doesn't actually agree with him in his own twisted, stereotypically extremist mindset, he asks the man just what kind of vigilante he is supposed to be. My own thinking is that Falling Down is not meant to be a warning about a group of potential Bill Fosters festering in the midst of society; instead, by showing us what happens to one man, it is warning us to walk carefully on our own journeys and to be careful to keep our tempers in check even when the world seems to be out to get us. At the same time, it doesn't imply that we should roll over and play dead whenever a problem comes our way, using the character of Prendergast to show us that we can and should stand up for ourselves but only in constructive ways. I really have a lot of conflicting emotions about this film, but the one thing I am sure of is that Falling Down is an unforgettable motion picture well worth seeing.