Jane Porter (Sarah Butler) is a young executive at Gault Capital, whose focus and drive in climbing the corporate ladder is a disappointment to her boyfriend, Ray (Jayson Blair -- an actor, not the plagiarist). She comes into the office one day to discover everyone oddly somber; turns out her good friend and longtime co-worker Mike was found dead on the sidewalk of an apparent suicide, having leapt off the roof of the building. At the request of Mike's wife, Jane goes into Mike's office to gather his family photos, and finds a Flash drive taped to his desk with some incriminating information about an embezzlement scam. She informs her boss, Ronald (Ian Gomez), and Ronald calls in a specialist, but Frank (D.B. Sweeney) isn't from the SEC -- his preferred method of corporate clean-up involves a silencer.

Setting an action thriller in a corporate skyscraper immediately calls Die Hard to mind, and there are plenty of great low-budget films that all take place in a single, confined location. The problem is that Akkad never decides which one he wants to make, setting up a movie that generally seems more like the former, while settling for the latter. When Jane and Frank first sit down together, Jane is still holding out hope that Frank might actually be someone she can report her findings to, only to end up in a chase through the building, Frank shooting at her the whole way. Since the movie would be over if she simply exited the building, she ends up trapped in one of the elevators, an outcome that should seem like the tension taking flight, but instead comes off more like the film writing itself into a corner. The viewer is left with a distinct awareness of films like Die Hard and Speed when what they ought to be thinking is Saw or Buried, a disparity that creates disappointment.

Once the film's settled in, however, it doesn't get any better. Jane's predicament is banal: Ronald frantically hits buttons on the elevator's computer system and crashes it, stranding the box between floors, and the roof hatch requires a special elevator operator's key. Jane is trapped not by anything Frank does, but a combination of stupidity and chance. Ray and Jane's secretary Pam (Klebe) are waiting for her at a nearby bar, but the threat of them returning is defused by the haphazard way the film jumps back to them. A friendly security guard named Lamont (Coley Sparks) has enough time to make a positive impression, but not enough to seem like a potential wrench in Frank's plan. Finally, Frank himself is a pretty run-of-the-mill killer type, physically and psychologically threatening, but incompetent in action. At one point, with the elevator low enough to allow five or six inches of clearance for a lower floor, Frank opens the door and starts firing wildly into the elevator, as if he doesn't have the complete luxury of calmly aiming at someone trapped in an enclosed space. Sweeney, whose appearance is somewhere between Kevin Durand and Gary Busey, gives a passable but uninvolved effort, right down to citing Schrodinger's cat, because every run-of-the-mill thriller villain must reference something smart.

Free Fall is already a bad thriller by the time the credits roll, but it has one more unfortunate surprise left in store. My good friend and former DVDTalk critic David Cornelius once hypothesized that Die Hard -- not to keep going back to that comparison -- slyly suggested women had their place in men's lives, and it wasn't pursuing a career in business. I wasn't sure it was intentional there, but it seems pretty on-the-nose here, with Jane's entire ordeal serving as a reminder that she should be rejecting the corporate lifestyle. Encouraging a girlfriend not to pursue her dreams is already enough to make Ray a bad boyfriend, but the film basically sides with him, on the off chance that a psychopath might be sent to cover-up an embezzling scheme. The filmmakers try and soften the blow by putting this wisdom in the mouth of its one sliver of invention, a handyman (Adam Tomei) who ends up pulled into the fracas, but even the kindly perspective of a family man can't cover up the unfortunate sentiment (probably not sinister, but disappointing just the same) of this already unengaging movie.

The Blu-ray
Free Fall comes to Blu-ray with pretty mediocre artwork of Butler trapped in the elevator shaft, which is a strange choice since she spends most of the film in the elevator, not the shaft (I honestly went in thinking she'd have to spend most of the movie moving up and down inside the confined area to avoid Sweeney, so for once I'm not theorizing when I say it's a bit misleading). The single-disc release comes in an eco-friendly Viva Elite Blu-ray case, and there is no insert.

The Video and Audio
Presented in 1.78:1 1080p AVC and with a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, Free Fall has the expected spit and polish of a modern digital production. The image is crisp and as colorful as Akkad intends, with strong shadow detail during the extensive nighttime sequences and no obvious instances of banding or artifacts. Sound is as well-mixed as these low-budget efforts get, with some atmospheric effects for the claustrophobic elevator and accompanying shaft, with the rest of the film made up of simple dialogue and music separation. English captions for the deaf and hard of hearing and Spanish subtitles are also included.

The Extras
The one extra on the disc is a genial making-of featurette (25:07, HD), which has some sound quality problems and appears very grainy, with most of the interviews shot in overly low light. Given the unremarkable qualities of the featurette, those who don't like the movie are probably not going to be invested enough to spend a half hour learning about the production.

Conclusion
Skip it. There are movies that use their limited resources to their advantage, ratcheting up the dramatic dynamic of an enclosed space. Free Fall isn't one of them.