Let’s be moronic.
My computer had a hard time loading this movie, almost as though it knew what I was about to watch and wanted to spare me this horrid experience.
The Fanatic is directed by Fred Durst, who appears not content with creating some of the worst music known to humanity, and now thirsts to ruin another medium. Durst has no idea what the fuck he is doing behind the camera, and the sheer incompetence bleeds into every scene.
We also get an astonishingly tone-deaf representation of autistic people by John Travolta (how far has he fallen for this) who I am almost 100% sure didn’t bother reading anything about autism in his preparation for this role. This film hates autistic people, and it wants to present them as pathetic and unlikable as possible.
The film also hates you, the viewer. The visual punishment of the film is hard to understate. Terrible framing and pathetic writing make this feel longer than it should.
Anyway, watch terrible Travolta (I truly hope this film finally kills his career for good) play Moose, an obsessed fan who seems particularly obsessed with Hunter Dunbar. Dunbar is about as abusive and bullying towards Moose as this movie is. This is a disgusting film that could only be made by the vapid and shallow mind behind Limp Bizkit. Goddamn, I hate this movie.
Aside from the terrible directing, bad writing, predictable plot, delusions of grandeur from Durst, Limp Bizkit worship, bad lighting, the worst thing is just how pathetic the representation of the mentally disabled is here.
Abusing and hurting the mentally handicapped seems accepted here because they are presented as annoying. We are never presented with any sort of nuance here. I don’t think we’re supposed to empathize with Moose (Durst certainly doesn’t). We also have people with autism presented as potentially violent, so good job on continuing that fake assumption, dumbasses.
The funniest part of the movie is I think we are supposed to see Hunter Dunbar as a reasonable person (he is certainly a stand-in for Durst). The fact that the man is an abusive moron makes me wonder if this was supposed to be a sort of self-criticism or a mistake.
Toxic fandom is a problem, but to make an actual story about it you would have to have nuance, characters, and even a miniscule amount of reflection—something this film lacks entirely. The deck is loaded here, we don’t have people, but instead we have puppets who are moving towards a predictable and stupid end.
This is easily one of the most hateful films I have ever seen. The tragedy here is that the anger is so impotently misdirected towards the mentally ill that any sort of righteous wrath celebrities may have over their toxic fans is completely voided here. 13-year-old boys could create a better rendition of someone on the spectrum than whatever this filth is.
No one involved in this production should ever be involved in another film. I think this might be the worst movie I have ever seen. It isn’t even worth seeing to see how bad it is, it is just pathetic.
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