Falling Down (VHS) 1993

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.

Warner Brothers
VHS Tape
Drama
R
Michael Douglas
Robert Duvall
Barbara Hershey
From private collection Very nice shape