YMMV / Falling Down

• Accidental Aesop:
  • While the film mainly deconstructs the Going Postal mentality, it also teaches people not to be assholes to each other. One of the reasons why Foster is sympathetic is that not all of his violence is unjustified: the gangbangers, the Nazi, the construction worker and the impatient golfer were genuinely unpleasant people who would've been far better off if they left Foster alone. Foster was definitely off the deep end, but the people who treated him patiently and with some empathy, like Prendergast, the house sitters, and the "Not Economically Viable" Man and the fast food workers to a lesser extent, are spared his wrath. Not to mention a lot of his issues stem from being fired from his job despite his good record, which is something a lot of people can relate to.
  • Police officers should try and be nice when doing their jobs. Prendergast is constantly ridiculed by the police for his "soft" approach to policing. However, it is this approach that actually works. Prendergast's patience and maturity are what help him not only track down Foster but help Foster realize that what he's done was not justifiable. This is maybe why Foster chooses not to shoot Prendergast. Meanwhile, his bullying colleagues use the "tough guy" police approach... and it completely fails at finding the perp and getting any information.
  • From this YouTube video: "If you started poking around in the system, if you start calling bullshit, if you started asking why your goods are more expensive, or your cities are more dangerous, or your lives are less stable, then you are putting yourself on a slippery slope that will turn you into a psychopath ready to murder sui his entre family."
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Are human beings driven to violence by external factors beyond their control? Or are we responsible for our own actions regardless of the frustrations in our lives? Or are both things true at once?
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Did Pendergast's daughter really die from SIDS? Or did his wife (established as mentally ill) have something to do with it? She seems extremely jealous of his attention and he notes that the girl should have been too old for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It could have been a case of Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, which would make the situation even more tragic.
  • Was Foster planning murder-suicide from the beginning, and his violence was because he felt he had nothing to live for anymore? Several scenes show him struggling to find work in a jobs advert, as well as the fact that he is living with his mom and can't pay child support.
  • Did Beth get a restraining order against Bill because she was genuinely afraid of him, or was she a vindictive ex-wife blowing past incidents with him out of proportion in order to deny him visitation rights with his daughter? In other words, did Beth's restraining order make a flawed but generally sane and decent man unhinged? It's worth noting that Bill had never been physically violent or threatening towards anyone before his breakdown, the worst he ever did was snap at Beth.
    • It's been implied that Foster has done more than simply "snap" at Beth. The movie shows even before the peak of his breakdown that he got unreasonably angry being rejected over trivial requests and demands (extra change or specific fast food) that were hardly worth complaining about, nor did it ever occur to him to look for other options, showing how impulsive he was and how prone he was to being personally offended, with it being likely that his shifting states and anger was a never-ending routine. There's also the fact that Foster kept on trying to contact his wife and child at inappropriate times and wouldn't stop. This probably would explain Beth's initial reluctance to file the restraining order as doing more "harm than good".
  • Are Prendergast's colleagues just obnoxious bullies who look down on his polite and soft-spoken ways (as well as the fact that he has a desk job by choice)? Or are they corrupt assholes who resent Prendergast for making them look bad? Considering they do throw him a nice retirement party (discounting the cat litter stunt), it could be the former.
  • Are the road construction crew actually fixing a road that doesn't need to be fixed or are they actually fixing or upgrading something that runs under the road, like sewer, water or gas pipes, or telecom and power transmission cables?
• Base-Breaking Character: Foster, naturally. Ignoring how much of a positive response he had from the audience, the question seems to be how much sympathy he deserves. Even accepting that he's a bad person, is he an abusive misogynist who was plotting to kill his wife and daughter, or an Everyman who was pushed too far?
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Foster fights against a lot of things that many people find annoying, including overpriced convenience stores, unhelpful cashiers, snobby golfers, pointless road construction, gangbangers, Neo-Nazis, ridiculous business policies, and more. Even though Foster is making his journey into a Villain Protagonist, it's obviously part of the appeal to see him smack down some Asshole Victims.
  • Prendergast earns a lot of cheers for standing up to his emotionally unstable wife, punching one of his disrespectful co-workers in the face, cussing out his boss on camera, and stopping Foster's rampage while also telling him off for thinking his attitude was justified. Plus, he does this without resorting to extremely unlawful behavior.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Who hasn't fantasized about taking revenge on all the jerkasses in a cruel and feckless world? The fantasy is heavily deconstructed in how anyone who tries embarking on doing this is portrayed as dangerous and mentally unstable people who pose a threat to society, as shown with Foster at the end.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Every viewer loved Foster for his attitude against the gangbangers, the neo-Nazi, and the rich bastard. Bonus point for the fatigues he got from the military store, which almost looks like a leather coat. The film actually seems to deliberately invoke it, encouraging the audience to root for Foster before Prendergast ruthlessly deconstructs his character in the final scene, saying that everyone has problems like his and "that doesn't give you any special right to do what you did today."
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Sandra is popular among fans for being the only truly supportive presence in Prendergast's life, on top of being competent and badass.
• Evil Is Cool: There are times when we cheer Foster's violent handling of every Jerkass he comes across, but frankly everything he does apart from defending himself from the two thugs, dismissing the beggar, and killing the Neo-Nazi is just unethical. It doesn't make his violent reactions to being treated disrespectfully much less satisfying to watch, though.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Some fans support Sandra and Prendergast getting together, considering she is far more supportive of him and his career than Prendergast's own wife.
• Genius Bonus: One of the most memorable characters is the African American "Not Economically Viable" Man who protests not getting a loan. This is a subtle reference to redlining, a practice by which African Americans were systematically denied home loans to limit social mobility among blacks.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the 21st century, the fear of a maniac shooting up the town has gone from a movie trope to a frighteningly common occurrence with the rise of mass shooters.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Michael Douglas' character, Bill Foster, shares his name with a Marvel Comics superhero who was the best friend of Hank Pym. Some 22 years later, Douglas would actually play Hank Pym in Ant-Man, and faced Bill Foster, played by Laurence Fishburne, in its sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp.
  • Foster's rant about the restaurant not serving breakfast after a certain time. McDonald's introduced all-day breakfast in 2015 (although it's not available in all restaurants).
• Informed Wrongness: This YouTube video posits that the film was written in such a way to undermine Foster's complaints about the capitalistic society that disposed of him, and pushes him down the path of insanity, with his slippage coming across as forced. See Accidental Aesop for more.
• Hollywood Homely: Prendergast tells Sandra that she doesn't understand what it's like to be beautiful. She is played by Rachel Ticotin. To be fair, he may simply mean that she doesn't understand what it's like to rely on her looks.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Foster leaves a scale of devastation in his wake, becomes a borderline terrorist, shoots one of Prendergast's colleagues, and possibly planned the murder of his ex-wife and daughter. However, while Foster's actions are certainly indefensible, he at least has a sympathetic reason for lashing out against society. The characters listed below earn greater hatred from the audience:
  • The gangbangers who tried to mug Foster and then murder him with a drive-by shooting, killing several innocent people in the process. Most people agree that the one who survived the subsequent car crash deserved a shot in the leg.
  • The homeless Phony Veteran who Foster easily catches in his lies about having served in the military, and is strongly implied to have made up his sob story just to fleece gullible, sentimental passersby.
  • The Neo-Nazi who gushes about Foster's violence, thinking he's a fellow white supremacist, and later tries to have him arrested when Foster calls him out on his disgusting beliefs.
  • The Jerkass old golfer who swung a golf ball at Foster because he was too impatient to wait for Foster to walk off the course.
  • Many of Prendergast's colleagues are bullies who degrade him even on what's supposed to be his last day.
• Love to Hate:
  • The gangbangers and the Neo-Nazi.
  • The homeless man Foster encounters is memorable for the plethora of pathetic lies he tells Foster.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The Nazi scene has gotten a lot of attention, specifically the part where he smashes Foster's gift to his daughter while proclaiming that it's "faygit shyit".
  • "NOT ECONOMICALLY VIABLE!"
  • During The World Cup in 2010, a Brazilian blogger made "Dunga Falling Down", scenes with a Gag Dub where Foster stood in for the Hero with Bad Publicity coach of the national football team (it begun with the Whammyburger scene becoming "what Dunga really said in the press conference") — helps the hairstyle and such were similar◊. It even warranted an extra chapter when Dunga returned following a shameful campaign in the 2014 tournament.
  • The Whammy Burger and golf course scenes both are quite popular as well, especially after they were parodied in Das Bo Schitt's The G Mod Idiot Box series.
  • The movie may be more known in Spain for the late 90's-early 2000's satirical program El Informal, where the clip of Foster punching the loudmouth at the traffic jam was played with different comical dubs.
• Misaimed Fandom: There is a fanbase for this movie who think that Foster's actions were justified, including his abuse of his family, and believe that was the point of the film. Apparently, they missed the revelation "I'm the bad guy?" that Foster has towards the climax of the movie, which is meant to be a Heel Realization that he really was the bad guy the whole time. If that wasn't enough, it's followed by Sergeant Prendergast being Disappointed by the Motive and calling Foster out on his bullshit, saying that he had no right to do what he did. The point of the movie, therefore, is that Foster (and people like him) are psychopaths who only care about themselves, and that such violent impulses that result in mass murder can never be justified. Disturbingly, one real-life mass shooter cited this film as an inspiration.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • When the neo-Nazi smashes the snow globe Foster was bringing his daughter, it seems to be the breaking point. He shoots the Nazi to death, but also seems to take a shot at his own reflection, a pointed move. The following phone call to his wife is much darker and threatening than previous calls, and with the snow globe gone, Foster only has dark reasons for returning home now. In this phone call too, he uses an analogy for having reached the point of no return.
  • Following all that, him smirking at a dying old man for attempting to hit him with a golf ball was just plain sadistic and definitely showed he was starting to lose it.
  • The neo-Nazi store owner was probably over the horizon already, but definitely proves it when he threatens to send Foster to prison and revels in the thought of him being raped.
  • The gang bangers' drive-by shooting of Foster. They not only tried to murder a man for the horrible crime of defending himself from their mugging, they shoot (and possibly kill) other innocent people in the process.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The "Not Economically Viable!" Man
  • The neo-Nazi freak is genuinely unsettling.
  • The random black kid that gives Foster advice on how to handle the rocket launcher.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Michael Paul Chan as the Korean store owner, years before The Closer.
  • Lois Smith as Mrs. Foster, Bill's mother, almost ten years before she was Dr. Iris Hineman.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Foster gets nearly as much of this as the DILP treatment. Many forget that at the end of the day, though he did bad things, he was not, or at least never meant to become, a "bad guy." He was, as his wife says, a sick man who needed help and whose issues combined with a run of bad luck he had no control over resulted in him becoming the violent man we see in the film.
  • Beth, his ex-wife, is treated by fans as a nasty, self-centered shrew, not someone who was justified in not wanting to deal with someone who was clearly a temperamental nutcase. You'd be AMAZED to find out how many online comments just LOVE to blame her for his behavior, accusing her of being the wrong one in the marriage and screwing Foster over for not being able to see his child, completely ignoring the fact that he was already delusional and angry. This could be because the movie initially appears to put Foster in the right and that his anger is based on legitimate and unfair victimization, when it's revealed late in that he was actually self-destructive from the beginning and therefore unable to see himself in the wrong sense, never being able to process his own accountability in his actions.
• The Scrappy: Mrs Prenderghast spends the entirety of her screentime nagging, criticizing, and bothering her husband.
• Signature Line: "I'm the bad guy?"
• Special Effect Failure: The butterfly knife Foster uses to stab the neo-Nazi guy has skeletonized (i.e. partially see-through) grips, but the camera lingers in closeup on the stunt knife the actor removes from his shoulder long enough to show that it's obviously a single piece handle mocked up to superficially resemble the real weapon.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Given how polarizing the official adaptation of The Killing Joke was, this may be the best adaptation of such ever made, with the comparisons between Foster and Prendergast (two men confronted by tragedy who responded in very different ways, one turning to crime and nihilism and one committing himself to justice) uncannily similar to that between The Joker and Batman.
• Strawman Has a Point: He's obviously extreme and very unstable, but with Bill's justification for his crimes (he devoted himself to a country that saw him as expendable and let itself rot with crime and social issues and he's dealing with a few people who genuinely are unpleasant, obstructive and callous), it's not hard to sympathize with him and understand his frustrations...if perhaps not his coping mechanisms.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Foster being a defense contractor who lost his job after the fall of the Soviet Union could only be a plot point at the specific time this film was made. The War on Terror and growing competition with powers like Russia and China in the 21st century have led to a resurgence of the defense industry.
  • Foster's rant in the fast food restaurant over breakfast not being served after a certain time. Shortly after the film came out, many fast food places created a 'sliding' breakfast-to-lunch transition, where you could still get breakfast foods for a while after breakfast officially ended to avoid just the sort of customer annoyance depicted in the film. Since then, several fast food franchises have started serving breakfast all day, in particular McDonald's, of which the film's restaurant is a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo.
  • Foster is shown looking through a wanted ads section for a job and using a payphone. Nowadays, a white-collar worker such as himself could use a website like Indeed to find another job and call his ex-wife using a smartphone. The beginning of his rampage, his fight with a cashier over pay phone change, isn't likely to occur today.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: There is a chance Beth could lose a few sympathy points from pet-lovers due to the fact that when she realizes Foster is calling her a block away, she grabs Adele and flees the house but leaves the dog behind to the mercy of her Ax-Crazy ex-husband, the audience knows Foster doesn’t hurt the dog but Beth had no way to know this herself.
• Values Resonance:
  • The Neo-Nazi is shown to be obnoxiously homophobic and threatening to a pair of gay guys. With gay rights and marriage now legal, it only makes the Neo-Nazi look even more despicable.
  • Foster's rampage is driven, in part, by his inability to find work and being discarded despite having been a loyal employee. With rising economic inequality a major issue, many people sympathize with Foster's frustrations, if not his motivations.
• The Woobie: Both the main characters.
  • Iron Woobie: Sgt. Martin Prendergast, who is so constantly disrespected by his boss, co-workers and wife that he seems to forget all about it (and to add insult to injury, urban decay has robbed him of various small pleasures in life, such as being able to go fishing at the pier). But he's able to endure it without losing it and manages to find his self-confidence at the end.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Foster has an explosive temper and doesn't hesitate to use it. But he has been so beaten down by life and people around him that you're just amazed he doesn't go further.

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