10 Best Joel Schumacher Films
1. Falling Down
Years before Breaking Bad took their protagonist and slowly turned him into the villain, Joel Schumacher did a far more efficient job in his timely masterpiece Falling Down. Starring Michael Douglas as William "D-Fens" Foster, a man who’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore, this is part early ‘90s satire, part descent into madness.
Stuck in traffic on a baking hot day, D-Fens reaches his breaking point. He abandons his car and storms through L.A, settling petty gripes with fast food workers and golfers, and causing untold damage with his growing cache of weapons.
There’s a video game logic to Falling Down, but more depth than is immediately apparent. D-Fens is a cog in a wheel, a working man deemed redundant, and in a city already on the edge of collapse (we’re not even a year distant from the L.A riots), he’s combustible in the extreme.
Douglas is career best here, ditching his slick persona and bringing real pathos to D-Fens as he realises that his supposedly moral crusade has turned him into the bad guy. Falling Down is an evergreen classic.