Review: Swimfan

Swimfan is more or less appalling, yet somehow manages to classify as a guilty pleasure. The acting is bad, the whole story is given away in the theatrical trailer, and there are thousands of enormous plot-holes; though for some reason, when the few well-done scenes work, everything just clicks. I have no choice but to not recommend the film because there are more bad features than good, though it works as a low key date flick for the many teenagers starving out there for some cheesy material.

One of the most obvious reasons as to why Swimfan was such a mediocre, and wannabe, movie is that Jesse Bradford and Erika Christiensen have absolutely no chemistry together. I often compliment the casting directors in my reviews, yet in this one I must ask them why they chose such horrible, and different, actors to play the two lead roles. When viewing the conversations that they held together it is abnormally tedious. It seemed as if Bradford and Christensen were afraid of acting each other, the innerving feel they created together was not made by any form of cinema, but by something else; it was almost like they had something against each other off the set.

I cannot understand who would choose such an out of place soundtrack, like this one, for any feature-length film. While the actors were shouting and screaming, and tension is at its highest, we get happy-go-lucky guitar riffs that somehow explain how high school is unkind to its students in the hard-to-understand vocals. When the happy soundtrack is playing at the supposed-to-be-scary times during Swimfan’s duration it’s no more outlandish than it would be to hear some rap music coming out of a church.

Six of the estimated twenty scenes we see in the film are any good, and when in there prime, surprisingly quite excellent. The problem is that the other fourteen are wretched, and painful to watch. I actually thought that the cheap scares hidden in some of the more haunting dialogue were actually very clever and intelligent; though most of them are ruined by the trailer, which gives away the last five minutes of the movie. And to tell you the truth, if I hadn’t seen it, I probably would’ve loved the entire picture, though if you have been to a movie lately, you probably have; and therefore I wouldn’t recommend this.

Swimfan works in some cases, but the end result is less than average. Though I have definitely seen worse in the “teen genre”, this turns out to be just plain stupid. What Hollywood needs is a film that has the cheesy texture of a teen movie, but is appropriate enough for young kids, and has intelligence for adults. Why this is so hard? I dunno. In conclusion, if you haven’t seen the trailer or any type of previews for this otherwise water-logged, you’ll probably get you’re money’s worth out of a matinee. But if you have, it’s just another lame disgrace to filmmaking, or as Weird Al would say, “Another one rides the bus”.

-Danny, Bucket Reviews