And here I thought Chris McCandless was a dumbass. I suppose this tale is slightly better because it’s fiction, but it doesn’t take a great deal of brains –or skill for that matter- to ascend an abandoned 2,000 foot tall ladder. Maybe it took patience and endurance, but little genuine skill.
When you title a film “Fall” –which came out in August, hmmm- I suppose you’re going for something dramatic and possibly biblical; not the soon-to-be short-lived chronicles of the Stupid Friends.
So one year ago, thrill seekers Becky (Grace Caroline Currey), Hunter (Virginia Gardner), and Becky’s hubby Dan (Mason Gooding) were doing some impressive climbing stuff when Dan got startled by a bird and fell off a mountain. Becky has been grieving for a year and done nothing since, which is –unfortunately-not how American life works. Quite frankly, show me the job-challenged twentysomething who has the financial stability to not work and hit the bars every night and I’ll show you a dream.
Never mind.
Point is, one day Hunter shows up with a plan to scale a giant radio tower, a ladder to nowhere, so Becka can get her groove-a backa. And these women decide to challenge sanity like few X-Gamers before them. The particular radio tower in question is out in the middle of nowhere and it’s twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower. And as I said upstairs, it’s only a ladder, one big ladder, mind you, but just a ladder; the skill set needed to climb this façade was mastered by my daughter at age nine months.
But that isn’t what this picture is about. Fall is about getting to the tippy tippy top and having the last two hundred feet of
ladder collapse, stranding the women on the top of their self-chosen demise. And, of course, we have to address the obvious solution – it’s 2022, you both have phones. Call for help. Oh … no reception. Wait. What?!
Let me see if I understand this correctly: you two have ascended a giant metal structure – among the tallest in an entire country full of metal reception towers- one that was erected specifically for the purpose of sending and receiving electronic signals … and you cannot seem to get a signal. Do waves not work the same way between the 2,000 foot tall thing and the smaller thing right next to it?
OK, so I just spent paragraph after paragraph punishing Fall – and I could go on— so why in Dante’s Inferno am I giving this a passing grade? Well, to be fair, the film sold itself on two things: tension and cinematography, and it delivered on both counts. Yes, I know damn well it was a giant green screen the whole time; tell that to my acrophobia. There were too many glorious cringe-worthy shots for me not to appreciate the film. And if you’re going to see Fall, find the biggest damn screen you can. I will not vouch for the acting, the choices, the script, or the fact that this was simply a monumentally dumb thing to do. However, it was tense. You want a thriller? Here’s a thriller, in the thrilliest thrilling Michael Jackson sense of the word.
Now let’s never speak of this again before I change my mind.
Two doofs of composures facile
Decide to ascend a vertical castle
I don’t mean to chide
But if you want suicide
Pills are much less of a hassle
Rated PG-13, 107 Minutes
Director: Scott Mann
Writer: Jonathan Frank, Scott Mann
Genre: Green Screen Machine!
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Thrill fanatics
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Acrophobes
