Falling Down

It begins, as do so many life-changing journeys, with a simple, seemingly inconsequential incident: stuck in early-morning Los Angeles gridlock, a nervous, perspiring citizen reaches the end of his rope and snaps like an overused rubber band, leaving his car behind and striking out for home on foot. Known only by his personalized license plate -- D-FENS -- Douglas's character looks like the junior high nerd all grown up, with brush-cut hair, black-rimmed glasses and the ever-present pocket protector at the ready. With fizzled synapses and that nobody-home gleam in his eye (usually reserved for the mutterers and hair-pullers that wander in and out of America's periphery every day), he begins cross-cutting his way through gang-infested central L.A. on his way to see his terrifed wife (Hershey) and daughter (the fact that it's her birthday seems to keep him going and going, like some Eveready Bunny caught in a neural net meltdown). Along the way he acquires a baseball bat -- and then a fully-stocked small arms cache -- that immediately draws the attention of the LAPD, and specifically, retiring cop Duvall, a man on the verge of nothing, who becomes obsessed with this apparently free-roaming vigilante. A director known for his flashy, pop-culture, extremely youth-oriented films (i.e., Flatliners, The Lost Boys, St. Elmo's Fire), Schumacher at first seems like an odd choice to helm this taut, over-the-edge thriller but at closer inspection, it's obvious that The Powers That Be chose him for his ability to add the necessary action-genre punch the producers obviously felt the film needed. How unfortunate. When anti-hero D-FENS starts slaughtering innocent people in his misguided attempt to get home (in the process of which we learn, actually, this walking anachronism has no home, or none to speak of, anyway), it's clear that Hollywood's boffo box office mentality has once more subverted what could have been a genuinely moving film. D-FENS is a cut-out, a cartoon Everyman we're supposed to feel sorry for and can't. He's a bad parody in what will doubtless be an over-analyzed film about loss of control. It's just too bad nobody on the creative end seems to have had much control either