Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Falling Down

William (D-FENS) just wants to get home to see his daughter on her birthday. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be going right for him. First there's the traffic jam, then the unhelpful Korean shopkeeper who "doesn't give change". D-FENS begins to crack and starts to fight back against the every day "injustices" he encounters on his journey home. The film has a story running in parallel about a desk-bound cop who is about to retire. He's retiring for his wife's sake, and obviously isn't happy about it. The cop tracks down D-FENS and in the final scene.
William Foster (Michael Douglas), AKA D-FENS, is an unemployed, divorced engineer in the defense industry who's reached his boiling point. First he finds himself in gridlock traffic jam, which he deals with by abandoning his car.
He subsequently happens to stumble across an unhelpful convenience store clerk whose prices makes D-FENS blow his top, by demolishing the store with a baseball bat after overpowering the clerk. Soon he finds himself in gangland, and deals with some tough-looking gang members by attacking them and running them off. When the gang members try to retaliate, they fail when they crash their car and D-FENS takes their bag full of guns. Unfortunately for him, a retiring cop (Robert Duvall) is on his trail, and soon things will come to blows as D-FENS heads towards Venice for his young daughter's birthday party, because his daughter is the only one who believes he is worth something.
Before reaching the party he stops at a fast food chain to get something to eat. He is dismayed by the condition his burger arrives, all soggy and sloppy. He points to the ad above the counter and says'I want one exactly like that'. When the clerk laughs at his request, he blows away nearly everything on the counter.
When he cuts through a posh golf club, a rich lawyer snubs for getting in his way. D-FENS shouting at him gives the rich guy a heart attack and dies on the spot.
When he finally reaches his destination, he gets his daughter from his ex-wife at gun point and takes her to the jetty. While having a final goodbye conversation with his daughter, Robert Duvall arrives and tries to calm him down.
He refuses to give up and says these final words, 'I just wanted to get to my girl's birthday party on time', before shooting himself.
This movie shows to us the stressful and unfair world that we live in. There are some of us who can't cope and take it back out on our society. Is there a solution to all this?

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