The Fanatic (2019)

Directed by: Fred Durst | 89 minutes | crime, thriller | Actors: John Travolta, Devon Sawa, Ana Golja, Jacob Grodnik, James Paxton, Josh Richman, Jeff Chase, Luis Da Silva Jr., Jessica Uberuaga, Rene Michelle Aranda, Marta González Rodin, Leslie Sides, Theresa Ireland, Denny Mendez

“Everybody knows you’ll never go full retard.” This quote from cult comedy ‘Trophic Thunder’ was a sneer at actors who flashed for an Oscar by playing a mentally retarded character. Such characters must remain cuddly and empathetic despite their condition.
Tom Hanks (‘Forest Gump’) and Dustin Hoffman (‘Rainman’) managed to portray their mentally challenged characters in a believable way and won an award for it. Sean Penn also made an attempt to portray a mentally handicapped man, but his acting was considered so garish and over-the-top that he went home without an Oscar. There was little huggable about his playing in “I Am Sam.” So Penn went ‘full retard’. In ‘The Fanatic’, John Travolta goes ‘full retard’ by playing an autistic man with an intellectual disability. Well. It has resulted in a special film to say the least.

Travolta plays Moose in ‘The Fanatic’. This autistic man with a mental disability earns his money by acting as an English police officer in the evenings and entertaining tourists. That doesn’t work very well, but Moose is a happy man because his movie hero Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa) comes to sign at his favorite comic store. After an hour of waiting, it’s finally Moose’s turn to get his hero’s autograph. Then Dunbar is called away due to a family crisis. Moose is waiting for him outside and asks for an autograph. That doesn’t sit well with Dunbar and he insults Moose, who then turns out to be a stalker.

‘The Fanatic’ is a hallucinatingly bad movie. The idea behind this film remains unclear. Is it about stalkers, gross movie actors who ignore their fans (their right to exist in fact) or about mental disorders? What got into director Fred Durst (music lovers know him as frontman of nu-metal band Limp Bizkit) when he made this film remains unclear. It seems that he mainly wanted to make fun of the usually vain Travolta. The actor is stuck with a downright grotesque wig with a mat. In addition, he is allowed to wear hideous Hawaii shirts. Travolta is fully committed, using a crouched walk, grotesque facial expressions and a few tics that disappear every minute. Moose is a character and not a character. Sawa’s Dunbar, on the other hand, is an unbelievable bastard that you can’t sympathize with.

Durst has shot a rudderless, laughably bad movie that goes in all directions, leaves plotlines open (something about a dead woman in a garden), features blatant self-promotion (Dunbar shares his love for Limp Bizkit with his son in a useless scene) and ends with an unexpectedly brutal climax. There’s a lot wrong with ‘The Fanatic’, but that’s what makes this movie so enjoyable. This production is so unbelievably bad that it becomes good again. Watching a bizarrely bad movie with a bunch of friends is never boring. ‘The Fanatic’ is almost as disastrous as Tommy Wiseau’s ‘The Room’. In terms of entertainment value, this film scores a big enough!