The basic pitch for "Swimfan" can be boiled down to three words: "Fatal Attraction, Jr." A high school-set obsessive romance, "Swimfan" shamelessly appropriates the plot of its infamous '80s forebear and reinvents it as the most mild of teenage titillation, a movie that somehow escaped its direct-to-video destiny apparently only to be an embarrassing wreck on a much larger screen.
Ben Cronin (Jesse Bradford) is an ex-delinquent who's turned his life around in the years since his reckless youth: poised to become a swimming star at Stanford after his graduation and blessed with a perfect, doting girlfriend named Amy (Shiri Appleby of The WB's "Roswell"), Ben seems to have all his priorities in order. This all changes with the arrival of the new girl in school, a cello-playing transfer student named Madison Belle (Amy Christensen, from Traffic).
Supposed to be concentrating on the upcoming swim meet that will clinch his Stanford scholarship and secure his future, nice guy Ben -- in between no-pressure lectures from his coach (veteran character actor Dan Hedaya) and shifts at the hospital where his mother also works -- is instead driven to distraction by Madison, who seduces Ben within a matter of days and with only minimal resistance.
After a swimming pool tryst, Ben almost instantly regrets the affair and slowly becomes aware of Madison's instability. It isn't long before Madison insinuates herself into the smallest details of Ben's everyday existence, and when Ben tries to call it off, Madison systematically goes about dismantling every aspect of his life -- inlcuding the swim meet, the hospital, his mother, and especially Amy. Seeking to clear his name after a series of Madison-inititiated crimes lead back to him, Ben hurries to find out Madison's secrets and stop her before more of his loved ones are hurt or killed.
{INSERT_RELATED}Director John Polson, perhaps to his credit, riddles the film with jump cuts and odd bits of visual flair that suggest he thinks he's making his own art film and not a teen thriller.
The cast, the usual gaggle of 25-year-olds playing 17 (Bradford seems eternally in need of a shave), invest their roles with the mimimum of soul the material demands. Christenesen's Madison, the kind of character who might as well have a sign around her neck that says "PSYCHOPATH" before the first ten minutes of the movie are up, is representative of "Swimfan" as a whole: a glossy surface that's nothing but two-dimensional underneath, and, worse, not even all that fun.
A good crew before and behind the camera can elevate a b-movie's status -- see "Touch of Evil" and, yes, "Fatal Attraction" to see it done right -- but a movie as jaw-droppingly uninteresting as "Swimfan" has little going for it beyond its likeable, if indistinct, cast and a storyline cribbed from a much more highly-regarded film.
The kind of low-grade "thriller" that has a character pop up outside of another character's car window to give the audience a cheap scare, "Swimfan" shoots for a synthesis of the cheap thrills of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and the teen sleaze of " Cruel Intentions" and delivers neither, joining a long line of already-forgotten movies so bad they can't even pander properly.
"Swimfan" is now playing everywhere.
