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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 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.