BEFORE: Well, I guess that's the film business, one day you're playing a priest, and the next day, 26 years earlier, you're playing a psychopath. Or something like that, look, I don't know how it all works, I've got the benefit of hindsight, where I can riffle through the filmography of somebody who's been making movies for a long time, like Mark Wahlberg, who carries over from "Father Stu". "Fear" is a film that's fallen through the cracks year after year, but it turning up on Netflix after all this time was a good enough incentive for me to put it on the list, and now it fulfills a small purpose, which gets me one step closer to the end of the month, and therefore Father's Day also.
THE PLOT: When Nicole met David, he was everything - handsome, charming, affectionate. It seemed perfect, but soon she sees that David has a darker side, and his adoration turns to obsession, their dream into a nightmare, and her love into fear.
AFTER: I feel like I've seen too many of these "love gone wrong" movies, like already this year there was "The Boy Next Door" and "Fair Play" and before that it was "Swimfan" and way before that it was "Fatal Attraction", which seems to be the start of the trend. They all play upon the shared (?) fear that we're all going to fall in love with someone who turns out to be a psycho-killer and totally obsessed with us. I mean, a little obsession is a good thing, but a LOT apparently only leads to bad nasty things like finding a rabbit in your stewpot or your dog's head in a kitchen cabinet. Umm, yeah, there's clearly a formula here that many directors are using, they just take the plot outline from a successful movie, cross out a few words and replace them with other words and then go make the next movie. It's apparently as easy as playing Mad Libs, you just need the name of an animal, an amusement park ride and a method of eventual death, and you're good to go. For this one, it's "dog", "roller coaster" and "thrown out of a window".
I just wish there was more of a point to it here - but for me I'm going to treat this as the unofficial start to the Father's Day season, but it's going to be a long, slow ramp-up apparently. Still, I'm on high alert for films about fathers, and here we have to pay special attention to the relationship between 16-year-old Nicole Walker and her father, Steven, who divorced her mother and now has a new wife, Laura, who has a son, Toby, from a previous relationship. You can call this either a blended family or a pair of broken homes, I guess that's all in how you look at it, but Nicole is clearly the child of divorced parents because she says things like "My REAL mom lives in San Francisco", so clearly she's not over it. Daddy issues for sure, like I guess she still blames her father for not loving her mother any more, so that's going to create tension and in a round-about way, will make her act out and potentially make poor choices when choosing a boyfriend.
You can see the subtle implications this dude is not on the level - he doesn't respect her curfew and says things like, "Babe, grab me a coke..." - he's demanding, not asking. He just sees women as sex objects and then, sure enough, before long he's beating up any other man who shows affection towards Nicole and also sexually assaulting her best friend at the same time. It's all about what women can do for HIM rather than the other way around. Worse, he dials back the clock at Nicole's house so he can stay out late at the carnival with Nicole, but this also forces her father to miss a crucial project deadline, because apparently there's only one clock in the whole house, and nobody wears a watch or looks at the microwave or the cable box at all.
From there, it's just a few short steps to murdering Nicole's classmate and then Nicole's father does some digging into his background, discovering that David never finished high school, which means he never even started college, and worse, he's been bouncing around the Pacific Northwest with a gang of thugs getting into more and more trouble along the way. He finds the house where the gang is squatting and wrecks all their stuff, including David's little shrine for Nicole. Typical Dad reaction, and of course you can rationalize his behavior, however it also escalates the situation until the gang of four is holding the entire Walker family captive in their own home. Now it's going to take a ridiculous amount of violence to get out of this situation, and of course the police are no help, how are they expected to deal with a drug-dealing gang of FOUR teens?
Again, if Steven had been more patient, maybe waited on hold a bit longer with the police, or, I don't know, maybe DRIVEN down to the police station in person to demand action, maybe things would have turned out differently. But that's ridiculous, right, I mean, who drives to the police station to demand action, who cares about their own family that much? Nobody, right? I thought so. Let's be real, OK?
Look, I don't know what your takeaway from this film is going to be - maybe it's "Don't let your teen daughter date a psychopath" or maybe it's the flipside of that, which is "Don't be an over-protective father, because you'll just drive your daughter away" - but that doesn't really work either, because what are you supposed to do, look out for her but also NOT look out for her too much? The message is a bit unclear, that's all I'm saying. Or maybe it will be "Don't get divorced in the first place, because your daughter will only resent you for it, and that will lead her to make bad choices" which is about as unclear as it can get. For me the film confirms my choice to not have a child in the first place, because if my teen daughter started dating someone bad for her, I just don't know that I'd have this much energy to fight for her, it looks damn exhausting.
Also starring Reese Witherspoon (last seen in "Your Place or Mine"), William Petersen (last seen in "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World"), Alyssa Milano (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Amy Brenneman (last seen in "Sweet Girl"), Tracy Fraim, Jason Kristofer, Jed Rees (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Gary John Riley, Todd Caldecott, David Fredericks (last seen in "Double Jeopardy"), Christopher Gray, Andrew Airlie (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Gerry Bean, Jo Bates, L. Harvey Gold (last seen in "Frankie & Alice")
RATING: 3 out of 10 self-inflicted bruises
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