Product: Fear (LASER DSIC, NOT DVD) (1996)
Rating: 1.0
Awful.
Fear (James Foley, 1995)Fear is a fantastic example of how a movie can take a stable of fine actors, a solid, marketable idea, and some great incidentals (in this case, one of the best soundtracks of the nineties in American film) and still manage to come up with an end product that can best be described as "blisteringly bad". Fear managed to be the worst movie I saw this weekend, and that's saying something.The story: boy (Mark Wahlberg) meets girl (Reese Witherspoon). Boy loses girl. Boy goes into obsessive stalker rampage. Girl's father (William Petersen, now immortalized in CSI) gets suspicious. Things get ugly.That's all? You ask. Well, when it's done right, it's great stuff. The problem is, it's not done right here. Nothing about this movie, in fact, except the casting and the soundtrack, was done right. Wahlberg was still a few years away from growing into himself as an actor, and instead of coming across as creepy stalker boy, he comes across as an insecure kid trying to play creepy stalker boy. (If that was intentional, it goes entirely against the grain of the environment in which Wahlberg's character lives.) The family couldn't be less familial if they tried; there's no chemistry, either positive or negative, between these characters. Come to think of it, this is more of a problem with the Witherspoon/Wahlberg relationship, which never once plays as true. Alyssa Milano has a brief spark of light as Witherspoon's nave best friend, but she doesn't get enough screen time to make anything of it.About the only two reasons to rent this movie are if the soundtrack is enough to make you sit through the rest of it, and to hear William Petersen curse. Otherwise, toss it. *