Watch Half in the Bag Defend Fred Durst and John Travolta’s The Fanatic
It would be putting it mildly to say that The Fanatic, the John Travolta thriller written and directed by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, has not been well-received. The movie has an “OOMPH!”-inducing 18% on Rotten Tomatoes, the box office was pathetic, and the staff of MetalSucks found it by turns boring and unintentionally hilarious. John Travolta’s scenery-chewing performance is certainly a howler, but no one do Durst down in the accidental comedy department, either; his script is truly ludicrous and inept, populated by characters who don’t even vaguely resemble real human beings and story beats more fantastical than anything on Game of Thrones (no one notices a dead body rotting in someone’s backyard for several days, the police have no forensics, and a man with a freshly-mutilated hand can stumble down a populated street in LA, bleeding all over the sidewalk, without anyone noticing).
Still, every piece of art, no matter how hated, has it defenders. And so it is with The Fanatic, which just got a semi-endorsement from the most unlikely of sources: Red Letter Media’s Half in the Bag. Although co-hosts Mike Stoklasa (the voice of Mr. Plinkett!) and Jay Bauman don’t see eye-to-eye on everything — Stoklasa thinks Travolta’s performance is legitimately good, while Bauman calls it “embarrassing” — but they both agree that “it’s not a movie that you watch and just laugh the whole time because of how bad it is.” Which. Y’know. We beg to differ.
It’s a highly entertaining review — maybe more entertaining than the movie itself — so regardless of what you thought of the flick (or even if you saw it), I recommend watching the episode. Enjoy:
