"Swimfan" is a movie so bad, so uninspired and so tirelessly predictable that it had to be made.
It is the logical conclusion of every single stalking-via-technology movie you have ever seen. And as I sat in the theater staring up at this 84-minute monstrosity, I realized we have no one to blame for this movie but ourselves.
"Swimfan" is a remake of "Fatal Attraction" and follows its plot almost exactly. Champion high school swimmer Ben Cronin (Jesse Bradford) has a perfect life, a perfect girlfriend and is about to score a scholarship to Stanford. Then he meets the new girl in school, Madison Bell (Erika Christensen) and his life is thrown for a loop.
The conventional plot wants you to believe that all of this is unavoidable, but then you think that maybe if Ben hadn't had sex in a pool with a girl he barely knew, things would have probably turned out OK.
So after their aquatic tryst, Ben finds himself with a stalker. "Swimfan" seeks to differentiate itself from "Fatal Attraction" by having all of its characters be teenagers. So when a teenager wants to stalk someone, what type of communication would they use? AOL Instant Messenger, of course!
At the beginning of the film, Ben thinks that Madison is only a little clingy -- but it is only after he receives 81 emails from her in one day that he realizes she is crazy.
This leads to one of the first "chilling" scenes, where the two are talking on IM. Ben politely blows off Madison because he needs to do work, so she blocks him without saying goodbye. The movie treats this like it is the unthinkable act of a truly crazy serial killer.
Clearly, the writers of this script have never used Instant Messenger, or they would know that blocking is a common, even accepted way of ending a conversation. Iwill immediately block anyone I am talking to who dares to use "LOL" or "BRB."
The acting is generally not great, but a lot of that has to do with the actors being hemmed in by a terrible script. Bradford plays Ben with all the clich
s of your typical high school cool guy, even down to the perpetual stubble on his chin (apparently every scene took place 12 hours after Ben had last shaved).
Bradford attempts to endear the audience to Ben, and does an admirable job that is shot down by the script. The movie wants us to like Ben, but then it also makes him a terrible person.
He is a former drug abuser and thief. He only moved forward in swimming by blowing off his chores in Juvenile Hall. And he says he loves his girlfriend, but then he cheats on her.
In so many instances, he's just utterly unlikable, as in the following scene: Ben is in a hospital giving an elderly man some medication, when the man asks why he didn't bring him a beautiful woman instead of some pills.
Ben replies "Because it's hard to find any women your age who are still breathing." How can a movie expect us to like anyone who would insult an old man, with not even a funny insult at that?
Let me clear something up right now as well. Madison Bell is NOT played by Julia Stiles, and as "pretty sure" as you are that it is her, it's not. Madison is played by Erika Christensen, whom you might remember from her critically acclaimed turn in the Oscar-winner "Traffic" as Michael Douglas' daughter.
Many predicted her to be headed to bigger and better things, and hopefully she still is. But unfortunately for Christensen, this role might be a career killer. She is so unconvincing as the steamy, stalker nymphet that she elicits more laughs than any of the movie's jokes.
And when she is at a party and utters the line "is it hot in here or is it just me?" and then removes her top, you actually can pinpoint the second in which all the good she had done for herself in "Traffic" is completely undone.
Director John Polson handles the film professionally for the most part and takes few stylistic risks. He does a good job of setting the high school swimming pool as a dark and dreary place, and not a virtual Valhalla of near-naked teenage bodies, as most other teen movies so often do.
The only major stylistic touch he puts on the film is a series of quick, disturbing jump cuts that he inserts into two scenes.
They are effective in one, but in the other scene, where Madison and Ben have a face off in the locker room, and it becomes apparent they will do anything to ruin each other, the director's style becomes intrusive.
This is one of the few scenes that actually had the potential to be scary, but only if it had been handled in a calm, cool way, letting the dialogue build up tension until it breaks. Instead, Polson's jump cuts fly all over the screen, with an average shot length of about two seconds.
I hope none of the young actorshave their careers torpedoed by this movie (Bradford appeared in "Bring it On," so if he can survive that, I'm sure he'll still be around). And if worse comes to worse for Christensen, she can always be Julia Stiles' stunt double for the eventual sequel "Save the Last Dance: Dancing Season."
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