The Fanatic

John Travolta is Moose, a movie aficionado obsessed with collecting celebrity autographs. Moose obviously has "some" mental disorder, because he is completely self-centered, compulsive, irrational, unstable, has a tendency for stalking people and, last but not least, suffers from narcolepsy. I write "some" in quotation marks, because I have the impression that the director and screenwriter as they are one person simply wanted to portray a mentally disturbed individual and therefore just used whatever the first ideas were that came to mind. The screenplay does not really deal with the mental state of the main character, it just describes it, accompanied by an unnecessary voice-over by one of the supporting characters, there is a very superficial sequence of events that lead to a tragedy of almost epic proportions. I don't really know what the frontman of the band Limp Bizkit wanted to say with this movie, and whether he even had a point to make. However, apart from the fact that Durst makes awfully obvious promotion for his band during one of the scenes, it is a rather bizarre spectacle. The directing and screenwriting are, as expected, a meandering chaotic mess, which can be "so bad it's good" for some people, but the real guilty pleasure here is John Travolta. Watching his acting equals watching a sixty-five-year-old guy act like a retarded child doing well on the first try. So, this is a car crash of a movie that you definitely can perversely enjoy watching. I wholeheartedly wish Travolta has an A-rate comeback, but this is not the way to go. (09/28/2019)