Fallen Off the Radar

Four dollars is a fine price for resurrection. I’d kind of forgotten about Fallen, the Denzel Washington supernatural thriller/police procedural; it came and went from theatres in 1998, earning a pittance at the box office. I’d caught it at the second run dollar cinema and remember liking it – not enough that it really stuck with me, but enough that I’d planned on checking it out again eventually. Enter HMV and its siren song $4 DVDs.

Wow! Four bucks. I can’t take a round trip on transit, buy a pint of beer or even the rent the movie for that little. Of course, there’s a reason that those discs are priced so cheaply: they’re not big earners, so someone in marketing figures out a price that consumers are willing to pay for films that they don’t feel are worth very much. Fallen is a helluva deal for that price.

If you go to rottentomatoes.com, where the movie is 42% fresh, you’ll find wildly divergent opinions of it. Some reviewers find it boring, some feel that it’s tense; some think Washington is miscast, others claim that he holds a troubled film together; many believe the ending riveting, yet others decry it as cheap. I’m in the category of the-film-is-flawed-but-still-great.

Washington stars as detective John Hobbes, who has sent a serial killer (Elias Koteas in a demonic stand-out performance) to death row. We soon learn that the murderer is actually possessed by a being named Azazel that can jump from body to body, and it’s/he’s out to get the man who caught him. After the killer’s execution, more victims are found killed in his same style, and as Hobbes slowly uncovers the unbelievable truth, his family is threatened by the demon, he’s made to seem guilty of the killer’s crimes and must go on the run, and he must find a way to defeat an entity that can masquerade as anyone. The concept that makes the film so great is that body transferral narrative; Azazel could be Hobbes’ nephew, his partner (played by John Goodman, just before he shot The Big Lebowski), his Captain (Donald Sutherland) or a complete stranger. (The stellar cast is rounded out by James Gandolfini, who also appears as a cop, and Embeth Davidtz, who plays a religious scholar with a personal connection to the demon.)

Writer Nicholas Kazan (son of Hollywood legend Eli Kazan) created a moody mix of noir-ish detective story and biblical thriller that reminds me of Angel Heart. Fallen has also been described as a mix of Se7en and The Exorcist. The pace in which it unfolds does harken back to the films of the ’70s (a plus!) and, I suspect, the very dark ending was probably only allowed because Se7en was a  box office smash a few years prior. Like Se7en, Fallen also has plenty of atmosphere and a heavyweight cast delivering heavyweight performances. Director Gregory Hoblit (Fracture, Hart’s War, Primal Fear) may not have the distinctive style of David Fincher, but he’s no slouch and there are plenty of stand out sequences in Fallen, including the “fast touch” scene, in which Azazel pursues Davidtz’s character by rapidly hopping bodies down a busy sidewalk.

So why was it a flop? I watched the DVD commentary with Hoblit, Kazan and producer Charles Roven, looking for answers, but I found none. (Although there are a few interesting production anecdotes and some solid insight into the creative process, it’s far from revealing.)

Regardless, I think the reasons Se7en made $327 million worldwide and Fallen a mere $25 million (according to boxofficemojo.com) have to do with perception, audience tastes and believability. For starters, it’s tougher to sell an audience on a supernatural angle outside of a horror film. Like I said earlier, Fallen is ballsy in the way it brings two very different genres together. As indicated by some of the Rotten Tomato reviews, however, not everyone was willing to get onboard with the concept. Se7en is a serial killer movie, with no supernatural elements; it isn’t asking you to believe in two different worlds.

And then there’s the star. (Warning: I’m going to try my best to avoid spoilers here but if you haven’t seen the film, you might wanna skip to the last sentence.) Washington is an A-lister and audiences probably didn’t like following his struggle only to find him end up the way he does. Se7en heaps misery on Pitt’s character, but physically he’s unscathed at the end of the film.

Now, you can pull an outrageous supernatural twist, and you can have a protagonist who is not what he seems (think The Sixth Sense) but it’s a very tricky game trying to set up the twist without either giving it away ahead of time or making it feel implausible. Fallen resolves its plot in a way that feels cheap and doesn’t give its hero a heroic climax (The Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil” played at the very end is inappropriately used to put a tongue-in-cheek spin on something that’s been very serious and heavy up until then – it’s like, “Hey, we know this has been a bit of a downer, but screw it – let’s rock!”). I also feel that Hobbes is smarter than his actions at the end of the movie, but I could get past all these things because of all the other pluses in the film.

At least I could certainly buy into it enough for $4. You should too; Fallen deserves a second life.

 

-Dave Alexander

Comments

Sean Nelson, mister film critic do us all a fav and shut the hell up. If you can make better movies than any of the 10 stars you want to retire, I'd like to see it. So just piss off eh!