The Fan: Review

Rating: 4/10 (3 April 2018)

Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes) is a $40m, Hummer-driving signing to the Giants baseball team. Gil Renard (Robert DeNiro) is a sales rep for his late father's hunting knife firm. He's also Bobby Rayburn's 'biggest fan', calling in a radio show to defend the price tag that other fans question. Gil, you see, was a Little League Baseball hero, aged 11, and is fixated on Bobby - shades of King Of Comedy.
Gil is also in a bitter divorce, being a psychologically abusive father to his son Richie (AJ Ferchland) and wife Ellen (Patti D'Arbanville). Must be all the knives. On the opening day of the season, Gil takes his son to the game, completely blowing his last chance at keeping his job, but also managing to abandon Richie at the game and to become violent towards Ellen.
Bobby, meanwhile, finds his lucky number 11 is already taken by Juan Primo (Benicio Del Toro), and he has to settle for #33, unless he pays Juan $500k. He then loses his lucky #11 pendant, and despite hitting a home run in the first game, goes into a complete slump.
To cut a long story short, Gil, after failing to persuade Juan to give Bobby his #11, murders Juan in a steam room, and carves his #11 tattoo off his arm (with a hunting knife) to be later placed in Bobby's freezer. Would you believe it, Bobby's slump ends. Gil, who gets away with it, and is now fired as a knife salesman, is very angry indeed that Bobby seems not to be grateful to him for his return to form. At all.
After this, The Fan goes downhill fast. Gil gets nuttier and nuttier - DeNiro melds Travis Bickle, Rupert Pupkin, Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein and Max Cady, and the whole thing gets into a confused, melodramatic, cliche-ridden mess that wouldn't hold up in an episode of TJ Hooker. I understand that Phoef Sutton, the original screenwriter, doesn't recognise any of this as what he wrote, and thinks Wesley Snipes was miscast. That's the least of what's wrong with it.
We're now expected to believe that Gil, after kidnapping Bobby's son and Hummer, sneaks into the stadium as an umpire with nobody the wiser, let alone that Bobby is fit to play after the night he's had. Directors: if you're depicting a raving nutjob as a master of disguise, your movie's in trouble.
Suffice to say that after what seems a very long, rainy time the Giants, the dog (Bradley) and the kid survive but the old LL baseball buddy Coop (Charles Hallahan) gets his head bashed in, as all old baseball buddies tend to do. Gil comes to a worse end than Bickle and Pupkin did. Not as bad as Cady, though.
Director Tony Scott was English (as I identified till I moved to Scotland) which is why to American tastes, the baseball may be inauthentic, and overcooked for dramatic purposes. However, I can say that I think I now understand it - for which I thank him.