Great news for you today, folks—Warner Brothers is re-releasing one of the best Michael Douglas movies ever.  It’s never been truer than it was today, even when it was released: it’s called Falling Down, and it’s bigger and better than ever.

Recently laid-off defense industry worker Bill Foster is sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, sweating himself to death in his car with no air conditioning, the window unable to roll down, and all around him, the cries of a legion of frustrated, angry people trying to get where they’re going.  But this is entirely too much for Bill, who decides that, while sitting in his car, that he’s going home.  He’s going home to his daughter’s birthday party.  The downside is that he’s divorced and his wife has a restraining order out against him keeping him fully one hundred yards (or possible feet) away from his wife and child at all times due to his explosive temper.  And he’s really having a bad day as he heads home, toward his ex-wife, toward his daughter, and toward his ultimate destiny.

As we go through Falling Down, we get a look at all of society’s foibles and missteps—greed, excess, homophobia, bigotry, deceptive advertising, frustration, oppression and everything else that makes a society weak.  But Bill’s not just trying to get by, like most of us—he’s taken matters into his own hands.  And he’s showing us that what the Joker once said is true.  He too had a bad day once…and that’s all that separates all of humanity from being another Clown Prince of Crime: just one bad day.

It’s chilling to wonder how many Bill Fosters there are out there, simmering in their cars in rush hour traffic, waiting for the day they’re going to decide to “go home”.  And what will they find on THEIR walk?  Will they run into a golf course and be enraged by the hundreds of beautiful acres declared off limits? Will they resent the bank that won’t give out credit despite the billions of taxpayer dollars pumped into it?  Or will they just find Paris Hilton?  Who knows?

Falling Down is most commonly billed as an action movie, and this may well be the best classification for it but it’s actually rather inadequate.  There’s shooting in here, sure, and director Joel Schumacher is widely know for his action film, but this isn’t a particularly violent film.  It’s chilling, it’s full of suspense, but if more than twenty shots were fired throughout the whole thing, I’d be downright amazed.  It’s a terrifying movie, Falling Down, and should terrify most everybody who sees it.  Yet at the same time, it should also make you think.  We can’t fish in most places without being warned about the mercury in the fish.  Where did that mercury come from?

The worst part of Falling Down is that it’s got a point.  It may make that point in the scariest manner possible but it’s no less a point.  Most people agree these days that things are wildly out of control.  We look back on the past, warts and all, and compare it to today, all we can think is, those were the good old days. And when we consider what to do about the whole thing, we’re unable to imagine where we should even start, let alone how to fix things.

Falling Down is a chilling cautionary tale for our time, even if our time was almost twenty years ago.  Who’s the next Bill Foster?  He’s only one bad day away—he might even be you.