Falling Down offers an interesting concept that is handled with the grace of a psycho wielding a baseball bat. The material has potential for greatness, but it is treated with an absolute minimum of subtlety, almost as if the filmmakers are daring us not to roll our eyes. The film was directed by Joel Schumacher and to be fair, the hammer-it-home style is The Schumacher Way, but this is supposed to be a serious film about socio-emotional anger, not Batman & Robin.

Michael Douglas headlines the film, playing a character that allows him to use his excellent shouting voice in almost every scene. Douglas' performance is strong -- he taps into the disturbing psychological makeup of a man who has already dived headfirst into a psychological collapse and is teetering on the edge of a violent meltdown. It is a much better performance than the movie deserves, especially since the filmmakers are so disingenuous they can't decide whether the Douglas character is a villain or a hero.

I keep using Douglas' name because his character isn't given one -- he is a nameless mystery intended, I suppose, to serve as the face of one particular segment of society's growing anger with the degradation of America. Whether or not the audience is supposed to identify with this mad man is hazy, as the answer shifts as the movie progresses. In the beginning, Douglas, sporting a flat top and black horn-rims, expresses his shock at the rising cost of everyday convenience store items like a can of soda. Identifiable enough... until he starts destroying the convenience store with a baseball bat. Then maybe not so much.

A movie like this poses an interesting filmmaking problem: how does one depict the gradual implosion of an angry man's psychological state? It is a tricky structural challenge, and not one the filmmakers navigate very successfully. The film wanders from one manipulative incident to the next, many of them racially-charged and drenched in over-the-top waving flag symbolism, in which Douglas finds a particular group of people in a very inappropriate public setting and proceeds to terrorize said group with verbal slurs, rising shouts, and all manner of weaponry, from baseball bats to knives to AK-47s and even a Bazooka. Not kidding. The sequences are not effective because they are baseless and without context; Douglas simply finds something to get angry about on every street corner, in every establishment. Chaos can work with a character like Heath Ledger's Joker, because he thrives only on terror. But Schumacher strains to make Douglas sort-of chaotic and sort-of understandable. The balance is tenuous at best.

The entire film plays out like an uneven teeter-totter of ideas, as Douglas slips further into violent psychosis, and yet the filmmakers also try to sneak in occasional moments of humanity. But when the film gives us literally nothing else to go on other than the man's quickly deepening vitriolic rage, how can we do anything other stare in bewilderment? If Douglas is a mysterious, imploding force, then he is a frightening anarchist for whom we would feel nothing but morbid fascination. If he is a put-upon, misunderstood soul, he would need to be drawn in much more detail. In its clumsy attempt to play it both ways, Falling Down throws in occasional hints to make us feel for Douglas -- he is divorced and longs to see his daughter -- but then drowns those hints with more seething rage. Occasionally he calls his ex-wife (Barbara Hershey) and pleads to speak with his daughter, but even the phone calls are played as vicious games in which Douglas taunts Hershey and implies he is coming to get her.

On Douglas' trail throughout the movie is an aging cop on -- get this -- his last day on the job. Robert Duvall plays the cop, who sits in a stock police office set and rolls his eyes with latent misogyny as he fields calls from his unstable shrew of a wife (Tuesday Weld), until he starts receiving clues about this guy going on a rampage. He engages in a tepid procedural in order to have an obligatory showdown with Douglas as he nears the end of his rope.

Falling Down might have been a strong film if only it could commit to a solid game plan. Is this a story of one isolated individual at war with society, or is it the tale of an average Joe who has taken his pain too far? Picking one construction or the other might have worked, but as is, the film crafts a furtive, literally identity-less psychotic who we still, by some miracle, sympathize with. It is an impossible construct -- wish fulfillment at its basest, really -- in a desperately lost film.

The DVD includes commentary from Schumacher and Douglas, plus an interview with Douglas.



New glasses and a lobotomy in about an hour.