The premise of this movie daunted me by sounding gritty. That said, director Joel Schumacher isn't known for grit. If anything, people wish he were more serious. In spite of his low popularity, I generally like what I've seen of his work, not least for his ability to fill the screen. If this was off the beaten path for him, so much the better for broadening my perception.
Bill (Michael Douglas) starts in a familiar scenario: an L.A. traffic jam. His first act to make him stand out is to leave his car, telling the objector behind him that he's walking "home." Lest you think this a retelling of After Hours, know that it's actually his former home, where ex Beth (Barbara Hershey) doesn't welcome him at all, but he'd hate to miss their young daughter Adele's birthday. As the plot progresses, we see more and more signs of why Beth got a restraining order: Bill becomes a formidable enemy to pretty much everyone he meets along the way.
The secondary focal character is Sgt. Prendergast (Robert Duvall), whose nervous wreck of a wife (Tuesday Weld) has talked him into early retirement from the police force, even tho he's been a desk jockey. We get no shortage of reminders that it's supposed to be his last day on the job, with some characters invoking the superstition that he may die today, as if they knew they were in a movie. This does not stop him from noticing a pattern in a rapid series of crime reports, which he takes more seriously than the rest of the department. You get no points for guessing that he eventually goes after Bill, his only support being friendly detective Sandra (Rachel Ticotin).
Bill is actually sympathetic enough that we can see why he doesn't recognize himself as a bad guy until his final scene. He's not just recently divorced; he's recently laid off, like so many defense contractors in the wake of the Persian Gulf War. (Credits oddly list him by the nickname from his vanity plate, "D-FENS.") And while he overreacts almost comically to any inconveniences, such as a fast-food restaurant refusing to serve breakfast at 11:33, some viewers may find it cathartic when he forces things to go the way they'd want, heedless of the likely consequences of his trail of havoc.
Nevertheless, his crimes get worse and worse the closer he gets to his destination. He keeps collecting nastier weapons along the way, and his appearance comes to look less innocent. There is at least a fair chance that he plans to kill Beth or will without planning, tho unlike Prendergast, I don't believe he'd kill Adele too. The audience does not root for him the way they did for Rambo in First Blood, so we can accept that he might not survive.
The "racial" and "politically incorrect" tags? Well, Bill walks through neighborhoods you wouldn't expect him to frequent. This means poverty, turf wars, and immigrants who haven't assimilated well. He gets pretty openly bigoted toward a Korean shopkeeper for charging $0.85 for a Coke (doesn't sound so bad today, does it). While we're supposed to see Bill as bad for doing this, the shopkeeper's depiction is unsavory enough to have generated complaints from activists. Still not as bad as a lot of Hollywood Asian caricatures from the previous decade or two. And to Bill's credit, he reacts more harshly to a neo-Nazi who mistakes him for a kindred spirit, even apparently disapproving the guy's taunting of two gays.
Yes, Bill holds to a few principles, or at least he tries to. His sense of fairness has him paying for a few things he could have simply stolen, tho he does steal other things. This is one of the qualities that makes Prendergast pay attention.
If you don't mind a movie in which the protagonist is an antivillain, you may have a pretty good time with FD. I don't think it ever achieves greatness, but it remains respectable on its own terms.
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