Prime Time: Swimfan (2002)

A teen version of Fatal Attraction, but without any leads that come near to the star power or talent of Michael Douglas and Glenn Close, Swimfan is the kind of trashy fun that will have you both rolling your eyes and smirking with amusement.

Jesse Bradford is Ben Cronin, a young man who has managed to overcome his troubled past and put his energy into excelling in the school swimming competitions. He has a happy life, and a very lovely girlfriend in the shape of Amy Miller (played by Shiri Appleby). So it's a real puzzle why he would risk all that when a new girl (Madison Bell, played by Erika Christensen) comes along, makes big eyes at him, and quickly shows herself to be more than capable of making trouble for him if she cannot have him all to herself. Everything escalates at great speed, making the attempted building of tension inadvertently hilarious as things go from bad to worse for our flawed lead.

Directed by John Polson, who would next direct a much-maligned horror (that I quite enjoy), Hide And Seek, before one other film and then a solid selection of work on various TV shows, Swimfan seems to know exactly how silly it is. The script, by Charles F. Bohl (credited without the middle initial) and Phillip Schneider, doesn't waste any time in bringing the characters together and starting to develop the danger, and madness.

The cast are all just right in their roles, even if they're not always acting in the same movie. Christensen, for example, is absolutely revelling in the self-delusion and psychopathy of her character, while both Bradford and Appleby could be dropped into pretty much any teen drama from this time. Clayne Crawford and Jason Ritter struggle to make an impression with their limited screentime, but old pro Dan Hedaya has no such trouble, of course, and James DeBello does well in a role that doesn't rely on him to use the kind of exuberant, brash persona he had front and centre in a number of his other performances. Kate Burton should have been given more to do, playing the mother of Bradford's character, and enlarging her role could have helped to add some tension to the third act (this could have been much more entertaining with more people available to be terrorised and harmed, or even killed).

This remains a distracting bit of fun because of it so obviously riffing on something much better. As a standard teen thriller, however, it falls below so many others. I've not seen all of the titles available in this market, but I've seen enough to have a good overview. And I'd put Disturbia, Disturbing Behaviour, Gossip, and maybe even The In Crowd ahead of this, even if some of them are a very close call.

5/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy it here.

Hackers (1995)

You know what all the cool kids were up to in the 1990s? They were showing off their computer hacking skills, whizzing around on rollerblades, listening to The Prodigy, and playing pre-release versions of Wipeout (not the gameshow, the classic Playstation game). How do I know this, despite not being one of the cool kids at that time? Because that's what every one of the leads does in Hackers, and this is a film populated almost exclusively by characters deemed to be cool.

There's a dangerous virus that threatens major harm to a big corporation, unless a payment of $25M is made, and things have been set up to pin the blame on a bunch of teenage hackers. Jonny Lee Miller is Dade, Angelina Jolie is Kate, Jesse Bradford is Joey, Matthew Lillard is Cereal, Laurence Mason is Nikon, and Renoly Santiago is Phreak. They're the good guys. Fisher Stevens is a man who works for the big company being threatened, and he likes to go by the name The Plague. He's not with the good guys. Nor is Agent Dick Gill (played by Wendell Pierce). To be fair, the hackers don't do much to make themselves look innocent as the authorities try to get to the bottom of this major, dangerous, security breach.

Hackers is ridiculous. It's a number of cool and funky moments strung together by an unbelievable plot that surely felt dated just a few years after it was initially released. The script by Rafael Moreu alternates between amusing and cringe-inducing, and director Iain Softley doesn't do anything in half measures, whether it's the fashion choices, soundtrack, or graphic design displaying the hacking sequences (main headshot of character, camera rotates around, and keystrokes and symbols are illuminated around them). But that's not necessarily the wrong way to treat this material, which is why the ridiculousness of it all ends up making it a fun viewing experience.

The relatively young cast helps, with a lot of likable performers on the cusp of reaching the next level in terms of success and recognisability (both Miller and Lillard would do very well just a year later, with Trainspotting and Scream, respectively). Miller is a lot of fun in the lead role, the cocky outsider who quickly gets in with the hacking clique, Jolie is some kind of ubercool cyber-pixie, and everyone else does their best to show that they're separate from the non-hacking plebicites that surround them. Fisher Stevens is also a lot of fun in his role, all arrogance and disdain for those around him, Wendell Pierce does well, and Lorraine Bracco is good with her underwritten role. And you even get a small role for Penn Jillette, and a fleeting cameo from Dave "Eurythmics" Stewart.

Although it's never going to be a film that you first think of when wanting something to watch for an evening, you could do a lot worse than this. It knows exactly what it is, it is very much of the time it was made, and it's difficult to hate. I enjoyed it, and I wouldn't rule out rewatching it at some point.

6/10

YES, I just pre-ordered this release.
Americans can pick up this one.

Sci-Fi September: Clockstoppers (2002)

Clockstoppers has such a great idea that it's hard to imagine it failing, which makes the fact that it DOES fail so disappointing. Director Jonathan Frakes (still best known to many as Commander Riker from Star Trek: TNG) had shown such potential with his work at the helm of a couple of Star Trek movies, including one of the best in the series, but shows here that he's not quite as comfortable when away from the comfort zone of the USS Enterprise.

A scientist (French Stewart) has invented a device that can send people into "hypertime". It may seem like the rest of the world has suddenly frozen, but that's not the case. Everything else just moves really, REALLY slowly in comparison. Some others want to get their hands on this technology, of course, but that isn't something that young Zak Gibbs (Jesse Bradford) is aware of. He just finds himself with a watch that can almost stop time, and he starts to have some fun with it. While he's impressing the new girl at school (Paula Garces) and helping out his mate, Meeker (Garikayi Mutambirwa), Zak is also putting them all in potential danger.

The potential fun of this movie is twofold. First of all, bringing time to such a grinding near-halt is something that we'd all like to do. Secondly, anyone moving at such high speed then becomes invisible to those still running on normal time. Unfortunately, the writers - Rob Hedden, J. David Stem and David N. Weiss - take the premise and stretch it way beyond breaking point, breaking the basic rules of the time trickery in almost every scene, which makes suspension of disbelief pretty impossible.

Thankfully, there's still fun to be had, but it's a much more basic kind of fun. Some of the special effects are great, especially in the first few scenes showing Zak discovering hypertime, and a few pranks raise a smile, but most of the film is standard teens in peril stuff that could be pulled from 101 other films.

Bradford, Garces and Mutambirwa all do well enough, and Stewart does much better with his role here than he's done in other family films, but the one actor raising everything up a point is Michael Biehn, playing the main villain who wants to get his hands on the technology at any cost.

The good and bad aspects of the movie balance out to provide viewers with an experience that's distinctly average. The sad fact is that everyone involved, from the cast, to the writers, to Frakes in the director's chair, could have done a bit better. It wouldn't have taken too much effort either, which makes this flat end result all the more frustrating.

4/10

http://www.amazon.com/Clockstoppers-Jesse-Bradford/dp/B00005JKZM/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1409931905&sr=1-2&keywords=clockstoppers