A gripping thriller, but a preposterous finale prevents it from being flawless

Rating: 9/10 (29 May 2020)

The Fan features Robert De Niro as Gil Renard, a struggling knife salesman and a baseball fanatic whose life revolves around his favorite team, the San Francisco Giants. Wesley Snipes takes up the role of a star player named Bobby Rayburn, who becomes the target of Renard's murderous intentions after being signed by the Giants for a record-breaking fee ahead of the new season. Both De Niro and Snipes deliver fine performances, with De Niro's character making for a believable representation of a hapless individual who is slowly consumed by his own frustrations and eventually gets to a point where he has to stay focused on making his demise as memorable as possible.
The Fan generally turns out to be a gripping and nicely made thriller on the topic of unhealthy obsession, even though it does rely upon many of the tropes that can be regarded as typical of the genre in the 1990s. It should be equally emphasized that the volatile nature of De Niro's character does a lot to keep the viewer interested in the story and its outcome. As for the choice of baseball as the sport around which the film revolves, it is certainly something that is not likely to be appealing to a viewer from a country other than the United States. However, The Fan does depict several issues that are commonly and timelessly criticized when it comes to professional sports. Therefore, it is possible to relate many of these issues to any other sport that has the potential of being attractive to millions of viewers.
At the end of the day, it is mainly the preposterous nature of its ending that prevents The Fan from being a flawless thriller. Unfortunately, the movie was not spared from featuring some ludicrously unrealistic scenes of shooting and murder occurring during a sporting event in the interior of a stadium filled with thousands of spectators, a plot element that had already caught the attention in The Last Boy Scout, an earlier film directed by Tony Scott and dealing with a similar theme. Another sequence that could be seen as playing a role in preventing The Fan from being a fully credible thriller turns out to be the one in which Rayburn's main in-team rival gets murdered by Renard in such a theatrical manner that I ended up laughing.