Free Fall hit Blu-ray on Oct. 28th from Anchor Bay Entertainment
I would love to tell you all about how the next generation of the Akkad family is making exciting cinema. I wish I were writing about a new film, directed by the son of Moustapha Akka (the producer responsible for John Carpenter’s Halloween) that is groundbreaking, or original, or just damn good. It would bring me such joy to tell you, if nothing else, Malek Akkad has at least one really cool movie under his belt. I can’t, however, because Free Fall is junk.
It gets off to a decent start. Some guy falls from a skyscraper, smashing a car below. Then, Jane Porter (Sarah Butler) is kickboxing with her boyfriend. She’s all-trained up, a kicking fiend, ready to kick and to box and to box and kick again, you know… like she will kickbox the bad guys a whole lot during the loud parts of the movie. Then her boyfriend starts hassling her about her career-driven ambitions, like she is a bad lady who does bad career-lady things at the expense of everyone else’s good time. Then she goes to work and finds out the guy who fell into that poor, unsuspecting car from earlier was her business partner. She discovers her boss has been a little sneaky with the business money (Malcolm McDowell… always shocked to see he has been up to no good) and starts poking around where she shouldn’t.
Along the way, she has more than one chat with her coworkers that suggest she is a super-bitch who is unscrupulous in her heartless advance to the top. That has nothing to do with the character on the page, nor in Butler’s performance. Jane Porter is not only sweet and kind, but also quite gentle. She has a lot of cares to give a lot of people. Where the hell is this chick everyone (boyfriend included) is talking about? She approaches a supervisor about her shady unearthing, and of course, he brings in a hit man to dispose of her.
Now, in a movie called Free Fall, a movie with the tagline “The only way out is down”, a movie advertised with images of its lead actress scaling a seemingly infinite chasm-shaft like that will be the bulk of its action… Porter gets stuck in an elevator car for about 40 minutes. That’s the movie. Butler’s character tries to get out of the elevator, then the hitman (D.B. Sweeney — more wasted talent, although he has his moments) tries to get into the elevator, and then we fall asleep. The movie is kind enough to bring in The Dumbest Character Ever (an elevator repair man) to give our protagonist an arch, however. With only a couple lines of dialogue, this true American reminds her it is better to be simple, put in an honest day’s work and raise a family, than it is to seek a lavish lifestyle. That “honest work” thing might be worth the reminding, if only, as mentioned above, we ever had any evidence that Jane Porter had done anything wrong. We are led to believe the very idea of trying to make money is inherently erroneous. Hey, maybe that’s true, but this movie didn’t do a damn thing to prove it. There are a couple evil people in this big business, but the protagonist is definitely not one of them. This movie really wants to be about the corruption of greed, but it just isn’t.
A brief climax is ushered in like an obligation. She finally kicks with the boxing, and it’s kind of cool for those 90 seconds, but it does little to satisfy the “suspense” we were kept in during her elevator captivity. In the movie’s final minutes, she is sailing with her boyfriend. He asks if she is “ready to leave it all behind”. Her response is “I have everything I need right here”. Hell yeah she does! She has a fucking sailboat! That’s not the simple life Joe Six-Pack described in the elevator, homegirl. Who cares if you quit your vague job in finance? You still have a fucking sailboat! What happened to the totally synthetic character arch you were having?
THE PACKAGE
Behind-The-Scenes Featurette: Sadly, the same level of competence displayed in the feature was also applied to this surprisingly thorough documentary. I don’t know whose idea it was to shoot the interviews next to what sounded like a jet engine in the first place, but they couldn’t do much to salvage their terrible audio after the fact. The only thing worse than the inaudible interviews is listening to passionate people talk about all the hard work they put into a movie this poor.
