The Fan

Try though he might, all the dreamy angles and soft-focus rain spatter in Tony Scott's (True Romance, Top Gun) considerable bag of tricks can't give The Fan the boost it needs to rise above its present sorry station: that of formulaic stalker film trapped in the body of a high-concept thriller. Too bad, because Scott's newest hit starts out with a bang and continues promisingly for nearly half its running time. And then? Well, let's just say De Niro's character enters stage left as a disgruntled knife salesman with glacial eyes and a too-rigid smile. Hey. You figure it out. De Niro plays Gil Renard, the San Francisco Giant fan to end all San Francisco Giants fans. Despite the fact that his marriage is in shambles, he's out of sync and out of place at the knife business his father founded, and his young son is slipping out of his orbit, Gil's on top of the world. His favorite player, four-time League RBI champion Bobby Rayburn (Snipes) has been picked up by Gil's hometown Giants for a cool $40 million. Gil's ecstatic at the thought of seeing his idol at Candlestick Park on a weekly basis. At home, he's erected a shrine, replete with scattered press clippings and factoids on the lanky, cocksure Rayburn. But when his hero hits a slump and Rayburn's game takes a nosedive, so does Gil's life: He's slapped with a restraining order from his wife (D'Arbanville-Quinn), fired from his job, and his already brittle mindset begins to crumble. What's a sharp guy like Gil to do? What indeed. De Niro plays Renard like far too many of his previous psychotic incarnations; He's Travis Bickle at the ballpark, and although early scenes of Gil desperately, pathetically trying to bond with his son through the game of baseball ring eerily true, that sort of psychological finesse soon falls by the wayside in favor of director Scott's powerhouse theatrics, and the character is lost in the mix. Snipes, for his part, does an admirable job of fleshing out an otherwise lukewarm part. But where Scott could have grabbed the sordid world of American hero-worship by its grimy sleeve, he instead drops the ball and lets his B-movie thriller instincts take reign. Hollow, predictable, and too glitzy for its own good, The Fan never even makes it to first base.