After the Fall Movie Review

Title: After The Fall

NY THEATERS AND VOD: December 12, 2014

Family man Bill (Wes Bentley) loses his job as an insurance adjuster after too many generous payouts. He’s afraid to tell his wife (Vinessa Shaw) they’re broke, but continues their upper middle class living in Albuquerque to keep up appearances.  He meets a police detective named Frank (Jason Isaacs), one night at a bowling alley and they start hanging out during the day, mostly Frank teaching Bill how to shoot.  After his car gets repossessed, Frank takes a few of his high priced belongings to the pawn shop. He discovers that his highfalutin, condescending father-in-law gave him some knock-off golf clubs.  His wife starts to suspect something is up when she tries calling Bill at his company, and is told he no longer works there. He chalks it up to new hire stupidity.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Bill reluctantly starts robbing people in order to pay off his debts, but it’s still not enough. He thinks he’s doing a bit of good, by robbing a liquor store and telling off the manager after witnessing the guy berate a sweet employee. After which he sees the manager start treating his employees better. His moment of awakening comes when an old man sees him put on the mask and has a heart attack in the middle of the store. He saves the old man, but almost gets caught when the old dude rats on him anyway.  Bill decides that he must pay his dues and give up the lifestyle he and his family have become accustomed to and sell it off. Frank puts two and two together and realizes Bill is the masked robber his department has been looking for, but decides not to give him up. Bill takes note and wants to be a good role model for his children by possibly turning himself in.

The Good: The rich people get a taste of what it’s like to be poor and dammit it’s scary.  This film is a good tutorial of what not do do when you reach the peak of desperation. How about preparing for the worst, and not spending all your money on crap you don’t need. Making a cop friend couldn’t hurt either.

The Bad: This film drags. It’s one long after-school special with “message!” screaming at you whenever Wes Bently’s character has a moment of catharsis. The characters are very dry and boring. The wife does nothing to help out, and doesn’t stand up for her husband in front of her judgmental parents. Instead of robbing people, he should’ve just done what he ends up doing at the end: selling off his life he could no longer afford.  Why drag your characters through the mud and show us how the upper middle class deal with despair? Nobody wants to see that shit. Most of us who haven’t experienced privilege are living that already. They kill the dog – c’mon, it’s just lemon juice on the paper cut.

The film was originally titled “Things People Do,” which was a much better description of the film. After the Fall kind of makes me think of “Falling Down” which had a much better plot about despair in times of hardship, and this title gave me a false sense of the story.  The economy sucks, times are hard, we need to live within our means and fix our lives ourselves and do it honorably and honestly. There’s your message, I saved you almost 2 hours of monotony.

Acting: B

Reviewed by JM Willis