One bad day. And that’s apparently all it takes. All that’s needed to turn a good, law-abiding citizen into a hard criminal. For friends and family to turn on them. And on the surface, this Joel Schumacher film appears to confirm that claim. All the things that the main character, William “Bill” Foster, happens over one day. But if you actually pay attention to the story, you’ll find that the movie is saying something different. Something else that shows just how things went so bad for Bill Foster.

The movie begins one hot day in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. The heat & noise of a traffic jam early in the morning pushes Bill to leave his car and walk all the way to his destination. But it isn’t until he arrives at a convenience store that he snaps. Enraged by what he claims is an over-priced item, he assaults the store owner and damages a large amount of his inventory. But he pays for hid drink and leaves. From there, he beats a bit on a couple of gang members. And when those gangsters fail to take down Bill later and get hospitalized themselves, he takes their guns. He holds up a fast food place when he’s a few minutes late for the lunch menu. The bigoted owner of a surplus store mistakes Bill as an ally for his Nazi beliefs and ends up being killed by him. Bill damages a construction site, scares an old man into a heart attack, and eventually dies by a cop shooting him at the pier.

I know this all sounds kind of insane. But if you watch the film and listen to how he justifies his actions, you might be inclined to be on his side. He talks about how prices are gauging people and he stands for his rights as a consumer. The gangsters provoke him by denying him the simple right of simply passing through to his destination. He’s not even five minutes late for the breakfast menu and is frustrated when he keeps getting told no. He points out to the old man how the country club is taking up space for a few people when it could be better served to the general public. A lot of Bill’s rants and dialogue do speak to how needlessly complicated and cruel our society can be. Especially when it comes to the day-to-day and common things we might not even think twice about. The narrative from this viewpoint gives us a guy who was fired after years of loyalty, constantly running into situations or people making his life harder, and all he wants is to see his daughter on her birthday. There is a lot about this character that we can connect with and understand where Bill is coming from.

But then the other narrative rears it’s head. The one that shines a light on the flaws of Bill as a character and how he frames himself. Yes, it is true that he is on his way to his daughter. But she lives with his ex-wife. Yet he refuses to actually recognize her as a former wife. He constantly calls her home, making her feel threatened and fearful. And it is through her we understand that Bill has a history of anger issues that have on occasion come close to him hurting her but always fell short. While that is good for her, it does show that there was always rage hidden under the surface. Building up until it boils over like it has during the events of this movie. And we do get to see one instance of him forcing his wife and daughter at a younger age do a few things despite her saying no to him through home video footage. Showing that while he views his marriage as something good, there are issues that he chooses to ignore.

Other contemporary reviews of the movie have pointed to how Bill might also be subconsciously nurturing racist beliefs. Not nearly to the same extent as a Nazi store owner he comes across in the middle of the movie. But more along the lines of claims and statements that the average American might not realize could be based in racism. Like how he argues with a store owner of Korean descent about how much money the US has given to South Korea and that should justify him paying less for his drink. The fact he can’t even confirm how much the US has probably given South Korea can be read as one such claim/belief he might not even recognize as being racist. While I’ll admit there are instances in the movie that could be read as such, I’m not sure that’s the real reason instances like that are in the film.

Bill Foster is a man who thought his life would be great. Have a wife and a family with a good job that involves him doing work for the US military. But he is at a point at his life where he has been fired for a month. Yea, him losing his job doesn’t actually happen in the film. It doesn’t happen on the same day as all these other events. He’s been unemployed and has let the anger build up inside. And we get the idea that over his life, he has failed to recognize just how different the world around him is compared to how he thinks it should be. This has lead to him losing his wife and child and even having a restraining order against him. And at the beginning of the movie, when subjected to heat with no change of getting his car’s AC to work and subjected to noise drilling into his head, he finally decides he no longer cares about following the same rules and laws he has been following. All he has ever gotten out of life that way is a disappointing and depressing life. Why not do things the way he feels is right?

That’s why I think the character is not so much exclusively racist on a subconscious level, but more that he is ignorant of how life has changed around him. There is a scene where he sees a black man protest outside of a bank, dressed in a similar dress shirt and tie like Bill, who was denied a small loan. The sign the man holds show the reason they say he was denied, which was because he was “not economically viable”. Using real world experience and knowledge, we could probably guess this was a cover-up for a bank not giving him money due to his race. When the police take this man away, he sees Bill and asks him to not forget him, and Bill responds back with a respecting nod. I see this as revelation for Bill’s true motivation. He’s a man who sees himself as being screwed over by life in nearly every aspect. And him seeing another guy going throw similar hardship is something he takes as confirmation that he should keep doing what he’s doing. Literally fighting back and damaging places and people he views as abusers of their power that get in his way of his final destination.

This is where I talk about the man pursuing him, Sargent Martin Prendergast. As we get to know a little bit of his life, he seems to have been at the mercy of similar life hardships as Bill. Even a touch worse in certain areas. And while he starts off as seemingly mild mannered, he does gain more confidence by the end of the film. He doesn’t go as far as Bill where he tries and just destroy everything with no plan afterwards. But he does fight back against co-workers going against him, curses out his jerk of a boss on live TV, and finds the confidence to hit the streets once again after years of being behind a desk. He sees that his life is not what he wanted it to be. But he’s taking more appropriate actions to take control of what he can and make sure things go the way he thinks they should. Bill doesn’t have a sense of what is truly right. Yes, he yells about how much of a waste of space a country club is. But he yells this as a guy is suffering a heart attack right next to him. Unable to get his pills because Bill caused the cart carrying them to go into a lake. And he just smirks at him and walks away. Bill is a man who only understands his own anger and life and will justify it until he is confronted into realizing it differently.

And that’s what happens. The Sargent holds Bill at gunpoint at the pier. And it is at this point that Bill is forced to face the fact that today, he is the bad guy. He could decide to let himself be taken in and watch his daughter grow up behind bars. But he thinks about the toll and weight of something like that might have on her. So instead of doing what the law says is the right thing – the same body of laws he used to follow that lead to his current miserable state – he does what he thinks is the right thing. He tricks the cop into shooting and killing him, so that the money from his life insurance can be given to his daughter. His life is done no matter what, but Bill does what he thinks is the best thing for his daughter to hopefully have a better life than his.

This is a movie about a guy who sees himself as a victim. But his actions often contradict that by showing how narcissistic he is capable of being. And while that’s accurate, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some good points. There is a lot about our establishments and society that work against the average citizen like Bill that needs to be taken down and fixed. But that latter part is something that Bill overlooked during his trek across Los Angeles. And that is what we need to take away from this movie. Take down what is broken in our world but then replace it with something better. Bill was a man that life had left behind. Some of that was because life just changes naturally, it evolves. But part of that is also due to life not giving him a chance to realize the changes and adjust. So at the end of the day, Bill is the kind of guy we need to look in order to find a starting point of how to improve our own lives.