Swimfan - La piscina della paura

Ben Cronin (Jesse Bradford) has it all--he's a high schooler with a great mother, a wonderful girlfriend and a great career ahead of him as a swimmer. However he meets beautiful Madison Bell (Erika Christensen) and (stupidly) has sex with her. It turns out she's a psycho and when he rejects her she goes out to turn his life into a living hell...and she's not above murdering someone.

Totally predictable but surprisingly not bad at all. The characters talk and act like teens (although they all look their age--early 20s), the story moves fairly quickly and I was never bored. There are some glaring lapses in logic but, while I was watching the movie, they didn't bother me. For instance, it's impossible for Bell to do all the things she does. Also the sex and violence is very toned down for the PG-13 rating. Good performances really make the film work. Bradford is very good as Cronin. Handsome, muscular and believable. Shiri Appleby does wonders with her sadly underwritten role as his girlfriend. Christensen is excellent as Bell. She's both beautiful and very scary.

No masterpiece bit a good, solid teen thriller. I paid $9.50 and thought it was money well spent! Worth catching.

The character Madison is interesting but when the story comes to the end, everything turned so quick and seems to get more and more nonsense. The power of Madison is overwhelming. She knows everything, she can go anywhere. At last, she, a young girl, killed 2 police officers! Going back to the swimming pool with Amy seems to be too dramatic and comedic. The acting skills of Erika Christensen is impressive. She shows inner anger but lack of psychic complications. When facing the "truth" that she was not loved by Ben, she did not show much "lost" by her eyes contacts and facial expression, instead, the editing did. And this is what the mood is built up by editing throughout the film.

This film succeeds because of Jesse Bradford. I remember him from Bring It On (another excellent performance), but it appears he's done lots of things. He's a great lead actor, and I can see him filling Tom Cruise / Ben Affleck style roles in a few years' time.

The film itself is a fairly respectable effort at a Fatal Attraction style relationship, with teen-thriller-genre elements of the misunderstood wierd guy, the new girl in town with a secret past, and so on. I can only think of one vaguely surprising moment (with Josh, in the pool) - otherwise it's fairly predictable, but enjoyable all the same.

Watching it, I couldn't help but wonder why the school's best swimmer and most attractive guy didn't have a bigger circle of friends (Josh the jock, Randy the drip, and a black girl with a chip on her shoulder (what an original character..).

Also, why would he be tempted by a girl who isn't quite as attractive (or as nice) as his girlfriend? - but I know that's often the case in real life, so I can let that go.

Finally, Jesse didn't need the whole 'troubled teen past' - in the places where it was used, it wasn't really necessary - and although I'm no fan of the family values lobby, I am thoroughly sick of the single-parent-family that seems to exist in every single movie these days. It's just a lazy way of adding to teen angst, and avoids the need to write convincing two-parent scenes.

Swimfan is fine, but is only really a stepping-stone movie onto bigger and (hopefully) better things for the lead actors.

Having recently seen Jesse Bradford as Rene Gagnon in Clint Eastwood's Flags Of Our Fathers and been impressed I decided to check out Swimfan. It's a typical teen flick, a version in their age bracket of Fatal Attraction.

Jesse's the object of the obsession of Erika Christiansen, a most disturbed young woman who had a tragedy that most of the cast doesn't know about, but that truly unhinges her.

After Erika seduces Jesse in a steamy seduction scene at the high school pool, she enters his life in all sorts of unwanted ways. Jesse has a criminal past, but got himself into swimming and is set for an athletic scholarship in that sport. When one of Jesse's swimming teammates winds up dead in the selfsame swimming pool, he's looking mighty good for it to the police.

Swimfan is not a badly done teen flick and in Bradford one has a young Tyrone Power so Erika's obsession is understandable.

Hey, I think he looks a bit like Power, maybe Rob Lowe.

Ben Cronin (Bradford) is one of those high schoolers that almost had it all: plenty of good friends, a sweet girlfriend (Appleby), and the swimming skills of a champion. His life and success track are scrambled, however, with the introduction to Madison Bell (Christensen), a vixen who becomes smitten with him. Madison seduces Ben in the pool one night, and while he feels guilty after a session of horizontal watersports, Masison goes Glen Close in Fatal Attraction crazy when he turns her down, and the movie starts to turn.

From the previews, Swimfan looked like a bad movie, an "Attraction" set in high school suburbia with Michael Douglas' role as a swim fanatic instead of a businessman. While the last third of the picture veers off heavily into the land of the un-yielding female revenge cliche, the first two-thirds of the film are actually a pretty provocative, tight character study with issues of infidelity and confidence. Christensen, who made a startling breakout role as a judge's intoxicated daughter in 2000's Traffic, plays it rather straight and sensual, which gives the film a boost, until her over-the-top climax, and shows that, in a B-movie sort of showcase, she can hold her own. B-