Hmmm. Let's take a bunch of adults that are taking an adult "learn to swim class" at the local community pool (I recall this as the "guppy" level at summer camp). We'll make it a combination drama and comedy, a "dramedy" if you will. We'll try to give plenty of the characters some depth, and make them a little complex. What do we get? On the one hand is the film The Big Bad Swim, and on the other hand, it doesn't amount to all that much.Brewster plays Amy Pierson, a soon to be divorced calculus teacher that is entering a mid life crisis as her husband, a teacher at the same school, has an affair with a coworker. She decides in the middle of this to learn to swim. While there, the instructor, Hunter McCarthy (Ricky Ullman) portrays one who has his own damage, and while he knows how to swim, he has his own set of issues that he carries around. And thus it goes on with each character flawed in some way, and all coming together with the common goal of learning to swim.
Overall, I found this film rather lackluster, with all the excitement of balancing my checking account. At times the characters bordered on quirky, but too often they came off as droll. While we avoided typical stereotypes, and unidimensionality that often plague these films, we traded that in for something too realistic, and without a good story. The drama is uninspiring, and the comedy is nonexistent in The Big Bad Swim.Overall Grade: C-
Reviewed by Jonas
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