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Swimfan (2002)
Rate:
6
Viewed:
10/19
10/19:
Swimfan is the textbook case of a film that was going well until the last twenty minutes when
everything went south, prompting me to ask, "What the fuck just happened?"
None of it is Jesse Bradford's fault because he's the one who carried the movie on his back from start
to finish. As Ben Cronin, he does a solid job even though he's apparently growing a goatee by the minute.
It's hard to say if his character made a mistake because Madison Bell is a lot hotter than his current
girlfriend, Amy, who's in dire need of iron in her diet. Then, there's Stanford University where
beautiful and smart women are plentiful. Hence, Jesse should've focused on his swimming scholarship
despite the noise.
Swimfan is The Crush all over again with
Traffic's Erika Christensen standing in for Alicia Silverstone.
Because she can't pass for a good-looking woman, Erika has to put on heavy makeup to be an impossibly
lonesome femme fatale. It's distracting to say the least, and there's no way she would remain
friendless or be unsurrounded by people given her sultry appearance.
The first hour is fine: hip, effective, quick, and easy to watch à la
Scream. But the last twenty minutes is when the movie changed gears.
Either the producers ran out of money, forced everybody to rush it, or had idiots for screenwriters, I
can only guess what happened, but it shouldn't be hard to come up with something original for a
satisfying finish. All the money and the backing of a studio have to be enough to make it work which only
requires patience.
Instead, they opted for a cheap, clichéd "Madison finds the most improbable way to escape the situation,
so she can return to the game" by having a police officer in the back with her and he has a gun in his
holster facing her side. I wonder how she got to the driver since it's impossible to get out of the squad
car from the back and there's a bulletproof glass that separates her from the front. When Madison died,
it felt so anticlimactic. At the same time, what's with the repetitive camera shots of Ben's sudden
reactions? Doing it once should suffice, but the editor keeps reusing the same technique ad nauseam,
ruining the primary effect.
Speaking of high school sports, I guarantee you nobody was ever tested for steroids. When the results
came in for Ben Cronin, I was flabbergasted and therefore laughed myself silly because I knew district,
region, and state champions in wrestling were abusing steroids for many years; it was such an open secret
that nobody did anything about it.
On the other hand, when Ben's girlfriend was deliberately run over by Madison, I was surprised to see Amy
looking good when her face should be halfway torn off with multiple broken bones elsewhere on her body.
In fact, getting run over by the Bronco is enough to kill her. Instead, Amy was all ready to go home,
perfectly intact in mere hours during the same night, and none of her family or friends bothered to show
up at the hospital?
When Amy, who's shackled to a chair, is pushed onto the Olympic-sized pool and left to drown, Ben's
immediate instinct is to jump from the opposite end and swim for her toward the deep end. I'm just
wondering: won't it be easier to run around to the side and dive from there? The fastest possible time
to swim 25 meters, which is one full lap, for a conference champion is between eleven and thirteen
seconds. Ben will be slower because he's wearing street clothes. Then, all of a sudden, he has a hairpin
ready to go to pick Amy's handcuffs while they're seven to eight feet underwater. Judging the time it
took for Ben to save her, Amy should be already dead.
A lot of people have said Swimfan was a rip-off of
Fatal Attraction. That's not true.
Fatal Attraction is a rip-off of
Play Misty for Me, and therefore, Swimfan is a rip-off
of the Clint Eastwood classic.
All in all, had the last twenty minutes been fixed, Swimfan would be a decent, if unoriginal,
high school psychological thriller with substance.