Falling Down

A laid-off defense worker, kept from seeing his child on her birthday by a restraining order, looks at the landscape of moral decay in Los Angeles on one hot, congested day and, after being mugged, snaps. What follows is his bitter and pathetic mission of justice, vengeance and vindication that reads uncomfortably like too many news stories. Michael Douglas is identified only by his character's license plate, D-FENS, in this attack on social ills, a film originally seen as the displacement of power felt by many white American males.