7. Falling Down
William Foster is having a really, really, really bad day. A newly-divorced, newly-unemployed middle-aged man kept apart from his single daughter by a restraining order, he begins to overboil when he gets stuck in a traffic jam on his way home. His patience with life finally runs out after being refused change for a phonecall in a convenience store. Falling Down depicts how instead of going home and getting stuck into a bottle of Jack in front of his TV, Foster goes on a wild rampage across Los Angeles. Michael Douglas' character begins to explode pretty early on in Joel Schumacher's film, but the extent to which Foster crashes across the city with such violence snowballs so quickly that the film goes instantly from a portraying a disgruntled man in a mid-life crisis to a psychopathic gangster in the middle of a turf war. Foster rapidly goes from giving whom he deems 'unworthy citizens' their comeuppance, to terrorising completely innocent families eating out for the day. It's a bitter pill to swallow when all you want is some bacon and eggs and you reach the fast-food joint just seconds after they've rolled the boards to the lunch menus. Ordinarily in the movies there'd be a civil compromise, but by the time William Foster strolls into a restaurant just past 11.30am, Falling Down is in full maddening flow, and Foster wields a gun instead, demanding an item from the breakfast menu. The film becomes systematically more chaotic as Foster presses on through the city, eventually coming toe-to-toe with last-day-on-the-job cop Robert Duvall. Watching Falling Down perhaps gives us a little more of an understanding into why Batman & Robin - also directed by Schumacher - was so astonishingly over-the-top. The director loves crazy chaos, and Falling Down has it in abundance.