Fall Review

Do not fall for Fall. Simplicity and high-octane adventure come at the cost of life and patience in this new piece from Scott Man. His break away from Dave Bautista comes at the price of being saddled with future stars that have yet to cement their names. Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner mount the adrenaline-pumping opening and the rock-climbing fears that come from a near-free climb up a surface that should not be clambered on, but it all ends there. References to Mission: Impossible, an inevitability that is not as hard to believe as it is inevitable and hard to feel for, Fall does fall for some usual tropes of the horrifying action-packed pieces that Cliffhanger tried to form all those years ago under the Sylvester Stallone banner. 

No Stallone here though, just gorgeous scenery and the beauty of nature. Horrors of the natural world and the inevitability of sticking your hand where nature does not want it gives way to the grief and grimness found in the terrible green screens and empty faces that see a husband plunge to his death. He fell, as the title placard obviously points toward. Fall soon becomes a barebones approach at understanding the grief of losing a loved one long before their time but the choppy direction and underwhelming pans around a cluttered home viewers have never seen before is hard to swallow. He depends almost entirely on cliché, the hard-drinking that comes from bereavement and the isolated crawl along the bar.  

Currey is in good form and does as well as those cliché moments can offer with her character, Becky. Jeffrey Dean Morgan appears somewhat briefly as the concerned father figure, and it takes Shiloh (Gardner), as well as some bouts of vertigo and shimmering hallucinations, to bring it all back to earth for someone processing great grief. But Mann’s direction and the writing he presents in this cast are all the usual stock of the action genre. Neither expanded on nor given a second wind by the obvious emotional core, Fall struggles to keep up with what else the genre can offer. Static shots, moments of intense survival and shock prove weary and ineffective when drama, whether it makes sense or not, is presented. What can tear those people apart up on top of a radio tower, beyond the vultures, are themselves. Pretty impressive, or at least it would have been had there been some stronger writing and less energy dedicated to the need to lose yourself to gain some freedom. 

Fall is poorly glued together, to say the least. Its pacing is all over the place. Mann is never quite sure whether or not he should rush through the emotional caricatures or plant them nicely and neatly so that the later moments of action have some gut punch to them. Sloppy balancing leads to a poor mix of neither, and instead the hard-to-follow yet extremely simple encounters and motives are filled with a delirious nature. It infects the characters with an obvious intent but bleeds over into the direction, which can only pad some establishing shots of its one-room, or rather, one-radio tower drama, so many times over. Fall is not as gripping, not as interesting, not as emotional, as it should be. Most of that can be pinned on the charmless direction.