Fall Time

I recently rewatched Fall Time (1995) on Tubi. The storyline follows a group of kids in a small Midwestern town who plan a fake kidnapping as a prank. Unfortunately for them, their timing coincides with a real bank heist, and some of the kids end up as hostages. Can they find a way out of their predicament?

Directed by Paul Warner (Portraits in Dramatic Time), the film stars Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler), David Arquette (Scream), Stephen Baldwin (The Usual Suspects), and Jason London (Dazed and Confused).

This is one of those films where you're glad you're not in the situation but can't help watching to see how it unfolds. The characters and circumstances are well-established and engaging, with a cast that fits the roles perfectly. The hostage situation balances humor and intensity, with one slapping scene that cracked me up. The plot is clever, full of twists and turns, keeping you guessing about how things will resolve. The final shootout is excellent, and the ending is a blindside, though I'm still on the fence about how I feel about it.

Overall, Fall Time is a unique and entertaining bank heist movie that's worth a watch. I'd rate it a 6.5/10.

This is the kind of movie which makes you wondering all the time how the madness created by coincidences will end, which is also the strength of the movie; it doesn't get bored. Fall time fits in the new type of genre that is introduced in the 90's: 'nouvelle violence'. The character of these movies are formed by the excessive use of hard violence, mostly in the crime circuit. As you'll probably know, the leading man in this genre is Quentin Tarantino, with movies like reservoir dogs and true romance (movies who look a bit like fall time).

The role of Mickey Rourke is almost made for him, and also Baldwin gives honor to his name.

It surprised me a bit that so few people voted for this movie, hence I would suggest that if you don't mind hard violence and you like a surprising end, go rent this movie, it won't let you down.

Mickey Rourke and Stephen Baldwin are about to pull off a small-town bank robbery. Unfortunately for their careful plans, three local youngsters have decided to do a fake robbery of the bank as a prank. Baldwin and Rourke subject them to sadistic and even sexual punishment.

It's an interesting central story, and the performances are good. However, the film makers have decided to set it in the 1950s and excoriate the entire decade. They also include several dozen shots of a woman baking an apple pie, and three children -- presumably the youngsters some years earlier -- playing around a swimming hole. Clearly intended to add depth to whatever the message this film tries to offer -- something like "don't try to rob a bank as a joke, because it probably won't turn out well" -- this movie would have turned out a lot better without that.

Released in January '95, "Fall Time" was the first movie from indie filmmaker, Paul Warner and the result is that he didn't directed another movie since, even if it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival. It failed to win and never got domestic distribution in the States, going DTV in several other countries and disappear from public viewing after a while.

The story penned by Steve Alden & Paul Skemp showed some promises at the beginning, but Warner was unable to hand it well to the screen, offering a pedestrian crime / thriller, not that well photographed, and the evident low budget kind of ruined the visual experience of a period piece (the movie is set in the 50's).

The only thing he did a tad better was the casting decisions with Stephen Baldwin & Mickey Rourke, playing the duo of eccentric bank robbers (full of homossexual overtones between the two that wasn't at all needed); David Lynch's muse, Sheryl Lee in a tiny (& exploitative) role and Jason London, Jonah Blechman & David Arquette playing the three unwary teenagers.

Baldwin offers a good performance as the nervous Leon with a great supporting from Rourke with his baroque gusto for extravagant characters and smooth delivering of his lines that deserved to be better written. By '94 when "Fall Time" went into production, Rourke, blackballed from Hollywood A-list films, was enjoying his new sports career in boxing appearing in just 1 or 2 weeks filmed cameos to pay the bills, and his Florence Nightingale's character here was just an extent of the rogue character he played 2 years before in "White Sands" ('92).

David Arquette can play this reckless 50's greaser character in his sleep, he had already played similar roles in the short lived TV Show, "The Outsiders" ('90) and "Roadracers" ('94). Jason London can't act to save his own life, even Jonah Blechman is better.

In short, "Fall Time" is a way average film, only recommended for fans of the actors involved, besides that is an exercise in dull and a near waste of time (the ending sucks and doesn't made any sense at all).

I still give it a 5, just for some of the actors / performances.

Man, how I regret wasting my precious time on this film. Fall Time is so awful that I kind of feel ashamed to have it in my DVD collection. Not for long though… Don't be fooled by the Sundance nomination (how this piece of junk achieved it is a mystery) and the promising cast: Fall Time is an annoyingly bad film. Its plot is contrived, the developments of the story border on the ridiculous and to top it off the acting is poor. Even those actors who proved elsewhere that they can do much better (Mickey Rourke, Sheryl Lee) fail to impress.

When you feel that it is a movie that you are watching and not a story that you could immerse yourself in, when you see sweating actors instead of characters or cheap sets instead of real locations you know that the illusion you expect to get from a film will not arrive this time. Try as I might I would be hard pressed to find a single redeeming feature in this film. I only gave it 2 stars to reserve 1 for the absolute black holes of cinema. Avoid it like the plague!