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Uh-huh. Bonus points for the top comment making the exact same GTA comparison I did.
Even Die Hard felt more grounded and believable than this. McClane is a bloody battered wreck by the end of his ordeal, while D-FENS hasn't a scratch on him until he actually gets brought down. And McClane is a cop who deals with hardened criminals every day, while D-FENS is an office drone who's never seen combat, and yet effortlessly mows down Compton gangbangers without a second's hesitation. Whatever Falling Down is, it's not "realistic". I don't even think it was really trying to be.
No I haven't. Does it have a similar plot?
Are you really going to ignore the rest of the sentence?
Right, and I contrasted it with an action movie which came out 5 years earlier which was, to my mind, far more grounded and realistic in its presentation. Likewise The Fugitive, which came out the same year.
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From what I’ve heard of the martial capabilities of gangbangers, this may be the least unrealistic part of a white collar office drone resorting to violence- it seems like an average 100+ IQ person less than 30 pounds overweight can significantly outperform even relatively hardened and experienced violent criminals by watching enough YouTube videos to avoid stupid mistakes and going to the range once or twice.
Sure, but YouTube didn't exist in 1993, and I don't think we're given any reason to believe that D-FENS has had any shooting practice prior to his rampage.
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This isn't a great example; reality is just weird. Socially, muggers often expect victims to follow a script (for good reason! victims are almost never carrying anything worth enough to risk their lives to try and keep it!) and whenever someone doesn't follow the script it can leave assailants completely non-plussed. So, "when mugging a Dilbert-lookalike, pulling one knife is enough" isn't too unrealistic a mugging plan. Physically, many fights really are essentially over in seconds, because humans are squishy and weak and just one deep cut or bad impact can be quickly incapacitating. So when "Dilbert" gets in the first hit with an unexpected baseball bat to the skull, "run" isn't too unrealistic a plan B.
Yeah, the rocket launcher from a random military surplus store (and the random little boy who knows how to use it!) was a much better example of this. Not impossible; "gang bust seizes rocket launcher" seems to be a headline every few years, including in LA. But clearly this one existed in the service of plot escalation rather than plot consistency.
An office drone with no combat training managing to overcome a mugger or muggers through quick thinking and a stroke of good luck? I can swallow that.
But the same man then
over the course of a few hours, all without being injured in any way or intercepted by the police (despite making no effort to hide his appearance and exposing his face to dozens if not hundreds of eyewitnesses). Part of the reason he fails to get intercepted by the police is because he just so happened to walk into a military surplus store owned by a man who has heard about his exploits on the radio and arrived at the erroneous conclusion that the man's exploits were motivated by racial hatred, and hence decided to protect the man from the police even if doing so made him an accessory after the fact.
No part of this plot passes the smell test.
Individual parts do, but not together. That's my main objection to Falling Down - even at his most restrained and grounded, Joel Schumacher is still too over the top to make a believable film for me. That he went on to make Batman Forever and Batman and Robin should have surprised nobody.
I'll admit that Phone Booth is something of a guilty pleasure, in large part because I saw it when I was 11 or 12 and watching it feels nostalgic. The plot is rather contrived (even more so than Falling Down, arguably), but it has no pretensions to social commentary, the dialogue is funny, the real-time splitscreen gimmick is well-executed, the acting is solid across the board (pretty impressive that Kiefer Sutherland has to more or less carry the movie by himself without appearing onscreen for 90 minutes, and he pulls it off) and the pace never flags.
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