PrimeWire

Review by Quora user Jason Bell.
“D-FENS is 1950s America, its values and beliefs roaming through savage, post-recession 1990s gangland LA, getting beaten down and erased from society. The glasses, shirt, pen holder and briefcase (note the apple) are the character. He’s the film’s “bad guy” only to that LA environment. The ‘50s cues and eradication of run throughout the movie.

The movie is packed with so much imagery that easy to miss.

D-FENS isn’t a person. He’s an era: post-WWII/Korea boom times of the American dream of financially comfortable, gainfully employed, patriotic, altruistic, stable family, white middle class USA. The film showcases the eradication of D-FENS’ era with the war zone and widespread unemployment of then modern LA because of disastrous government policy, banking industry greed, lethargic citizen decadence and selfish apathy. Tom Wolfe beat the screenwriters to the selfishness problem by two decades with “The Me Decade.”

Not being a person but a concept, and note every violent outburst is comical, because the socioeconomic situation is one big terrible joke, D-FENS doesn’t have a psychiatric disorder. While modern viewers would assume he’s some banal white racist, the army surplus scene shows that he isn’t. He’s a walking, talking, explosively bitter and angry anachronistic value system, exceptionally performed by Douglas.

Through the film the glasses get damaged. More imagery that D-FENS’ window to the world is cracked and distorted. The “home” he wants to get back to, ‘50s pleasantville, doesn’t exist. Many references to “not economically viable,” tenacious park beggars, cold-blooded gangbangers shooting innocent bystanders in daylight, presenting urban USA as a nightmare of a failed society.

The film is that apple pie is dead; gone are stable careers, edenic family life, replaced by something in the direction of Escape From New York with endemic greed and apathy, obsession with cheap useless consumer products; refused breakfast by a dyspeptic Whammy Burger manager dweeb in the silly suit.

Duvall’s character, the loving faithful husband, deceased daughter, mournful hurting household, is a whole other movie within the movie of how US society treats each other with contempt. The two meet up in the end for the first time. Duvall’s character, not unlike a calm, rational, wise fraternal American dream twin cousin, prevails because the values and beliefs of the ’50s era don’t need to die. By personal choice, anyone can uphold them, even if everyone or most around are contemptuous pricks or losing their mind. Prendergast is the cool, calm decision maker. His character makes altruistic decisions for what is best for everyone, putting his own life on the line if necessary, with only Det. Torres as ally and somewhat so Det. Brian. The Korean storeowner and Japanese cop characters are no coincidence. All imagery and dialogue and almost overcooked to drive the point further and further along.

D-FENS, spending the whole story defending values, can’t be psychotic since would mean ‘50s USA was psychotic. He’s the embodiment of assumed silent majority bitterness at the state of modern society, who expresses his discontent with violence with broken bat and gym bag of guns, which never works. By riddling the public telephone with bullets, another ‘50s nod, he’s become the ‘90s post-recession LA he detests. Like the character’s line, D-FENS orbits the far side of the moon in his LA ghetto travels, emerging back into radio contact to ex-wife, daughter and Prendergast, that his approach and methods to defending values, like his car and shoe, are broken beyond repair. The ’50s are gone but going berserk won’t solve the problems of the present.”