FALLING DOWN (1993) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Joel Schumacher
Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey,
Tuesday Weld, Rachel Ticotin, Lois Smith,
Frederic Forrest, Michael Paul Chan
Michael Douglas, sporting the least fashionable haircut and wardrobe in North America, plays a laid-off defense engineer who snaps one day during the morning commute, abandons his car on a traffic-clogged freeway, and decides to walk home through some of the meanest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. A violent, live-action cartoon, a tense, comical, heat-crazed variation on the 1968 Burt Lancaster movie "The Swimmer", and a pointedly bleak commentary on what some would view as the death of the American Dream. Despite some scathing reviews on its theatrical release, it's a terrific piece of pulp filmmaking: primitive, simplistic and horrifying.
Joel Schumacher
(1939-2020)
