Movies Reviews

One Fall – Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Sep 17, 2011, 14:07 GMT

The story of a man who gains healing powers after he survives a 200-foot fall. ...more

Too much goodness and light and not enough anti-hero doom “One Fall.”

“One Fall” is a great first try for debut director, writer and lead actor Marcus Dean Fuller. It has the right ingredients: high quality production, thorough, professional directing and a sound track. Unfortunately, Fuller tries to cover too many bases and the result is threadbare.

The screenplay is the story of a man by the name of James Bond who falls from a two hundred foot cliff and survives to find he has acquired magical powers. As it turns out, the director survived a similar fall himself, hence a story is born. However, not a very good one.

Surviving the fall, James finds his own injuries heal magically and he learns that he can heal others with just a touch. At this point, the film has the makings of an acceptable science fiction story that might appeal to an audience of fourteen year olds.

The mistake is that it gets more serious after that and loses the fourteen year old demographic without picking up the adults.

To do justice to the screenplay, it turns out to be about much more weighty matters than comic book super-heroes. It is about James’ simmering hatred of his alcoholic father and his do-gooder brother and his inability to move beyond his troubled childhood.

There is a great story here, a classic story about loving one’s family and respecting oneself, no matter what the circumstances.

There is also a great story about a man who survives a lethal event to become a super-hero. After all, it worked for the M. Night Shyamalan / Bruce Willis hit “Unbreakable.” However, MD Fuller is not Willis and he is not Shyamalan, and he definitely is not Willis and Shyamalan combined.

So, the movie could have been great sci-fi if it had taken the dark, mutant antihero and given him a film noir treatment. In that treatment, fourteen-year-old nerd Tab Barrows (aka Repeller Boy) has to go away, what with the comic books and all.

Even more urgently, the terribly upbeat, cool acoustic pop sound track has to dumped.

This is not a cool upbeat film. It is a film about the urgency of the inhumanity of man, to man. Silence would be better. Of course, the weepy scenes with dad and do-gooder brother have to be replaced with something more macho.

Alternatively, the self-discovery treatment could drive the show and the mutant sci-fi could be in the background, it which case the borderline moronic self-healing cuts and Jesus freak stand up and walk scenes have to go in favor of the hero conquering his bad breaks and coming to grips with the real world.

Even so, the film takes enough twists and turns to keep things dodgy until the very end. James starts to help his father, and then backs off. The people he touches get better, then worse. He revisits the cliff, to end his life, but hesitates.

In the end, the film cops out to a PG ending and this is not good. It was on the verge of something powerful, Superman dying under the rays of kryptonite, giving his life to safe the universe. Or something like that. Instead, the story gave us “The Wizard of Oz” with Dorothy and Toto going home to Kansas.

Coincidentally, another low-flying success in the mutant super-hero genre is the Argentinian Querida voy a comprar cigarrillos y vuelvo (“Darling, I Am Going Out For Cigarettes and I Will Be Right Back”) directed by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat from an original story by Alberto Laiseca.
This film deals with the noir antihero side effects of being a super-hero with deep-seated personal hatreds treading softly in the background. In all probability, it cost less to produce than “One Fall” and has substantially more punch.

Good supporting work by a variety of lessor known actors but those actors were high in quantity but low in impact. It could be that the acting was professional, but that the screenplay simply tried to do too much.

A better approach might have been to use five people instead of fifteen. A good-hearted film and harmless afternoon entertainment for children, at least those with the patience to sit through it.

Visit the movie database for more information.

Directed by: Marcus Dean Fuller
Written by: Marcus Dean Fuller and Richard Greenberg (screenplay), Marcus Dean Fuller (story)
Starring: Marcus Dean Fuller, Zoe McLellan and Seamus Mulcahy 
Release Date: September 16, 2011
MPAA: PG-13 for some violence and brief nudity
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Color