The movie was released 25 years ago this week.
Back in 1993, this grenade-with-the-pin-pulled of a movie was thrown into cinemas and the world didn’t really know how to react.
It has a score of just 56% on Metacritic, cost $25 million to produce, and made just a little over $40 million at the box office.
16 years later, and Fight Club would face pretty similar problems, with a score of just 66% on Metacritic, and a $63 million production that pulled in just $37 million in the States, needing the international box office to push it out of the realms of being an out-and-out flop.
But while time and hindsight has been kind to Fight Club, retroactively labelling it a bit of a modern classic, the same has yet to happen for Falling Down, despite it covering many of the same topics, but – whisper it – perhaps even better than Fincher’s film does.
Directed by Joel Schumacher – who can count The Lost Boys, A Time To Kill, Phone Booth and (God help us) Batman & Robin on his very eclectic CV – Falling Down starts off with Michael Douglas stuck in sweltering Los Angeles traffic, before simply getting out of his car, abandoning it to the world, and walking home.
However, his long walk is dogged by more and more extreme run-ins with modern society that further push against the man who has already gone waaaaaay past breaking point, and he decides to push back against everything from mis-advertised fast food burgers (with a machine gun) to roads that are endlessly under construction (with a rocket launcher).
Falling Down is a pitch black comedy about a man who is fed up with the world he finds himself in and decides the only sane reaction is the destroy it, which if you think about it, is pretty much the exact same plot as Fight Club.
Douglas gives one of the best performances of his career, complete with eye-catching hair-do and nerd-glasses, and he is brilliantly assisted by Robert Duvall as the cop following his path of destruction across LA, along with Barbara Hershey (now better known as the creepy mom from both Black Swan and Insidious) as the wife Douglas is slowly making his towards.
Falling Down is on tonight (Wednesday 7 March) at 9pm, and again on Sunday 11 March at 11.45pm, both on ITV4.
Clip via Warner Bros.
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