Two years later, Schumacher's Falling Down offered another gloomy picture but in a completely different setting. Under the pressure of the stresses of modern day life in Los Angeles, an average business man does for traffic jam motorists what the movie Network did for broadcast news viewers. The no-name man, played by Michael Douglas, snaps mentally, going on a careless rampage across the metropolitan area, during which he just happens to acquire a large bag of weapons and wanders through dangerous circumstances with remarkably good fortune. His path towards self-destruction neither heroic or villainous, with the doomed, soulsick man trashing symbols of modern life, wasting both a telephone booth and a fast food restaurant with automatic weapons, as well as destroying a construction site with a rocket launcher. For this project, Howard takes a far more subtle role than in Flatliners. He would be nominated for an Oscar for this kind of gritty, somewhat underplayed action music in the later The Fugitive, and like that better known score, Falling Down suffers from a certain anonymity that works well in the picture but not on album. One of the more creative tracks is "MacArthur Park," with a noir trumpet solo, a weary music box, and the distant, hip rhythms of a city's center in the background. Even when Howard allows the rage of the man to inspire his music, as in "Miracle Mile," the score is confined to almost jungle-like rhythms, often with tingling electronic accompaniment. No strong theme or motif exists in Falling Down, with one of the most unique identifiers of the score being a wavering electric guitar-like low brass slur between notes as the man's mental breakdown continues. The only true theme of the score represents the familial relations in the story, one performed by synthetic choir throughout the score but humanized by strings at the final confrontation. Everything in the work emphasizes the man's previous sanity slipping away, until a noir-like trumpet at the end lends a strangely optimistic cop-thriller tone to the whole affair. Overall, the Falling Down score is a mainly ambient experience lacking the vengeful grit of the film, and it struggles to maintain interest alone. On the 1997 album, its sound quality, however, is much better than that of Flatliners, and that clarity carries over to the nicely presented but not particularly sustainable 2014 Intrada product for the later score (that album does illuminate the difficulty Howard had narrowing down the right tone for the final scenes, and the alternate takes are included). Considering these two scores together, the highlight is clearly the "Redemption" cue from Flatliners, and only Howard completists will enjoy both scores from start to finish.   @Amazon.com: CD or Download