No Ball Player Wants A Fan Like Gil Renard

Rating: Null/10 (14 October 2004)

Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes), an all-star baseball player who has signed a 40 million dollar deal with the Giants, thinks his life is perfect. What he doesn't know is that he has an overly obsessed fan named Gil Renard (Robert De Niro) who will make his life a living hell. Gil, a knife salesman with a short temper, slowly lets his life fall apart. After losing his job and his kid, he tries to help his favorite player get his reputation back. After all, stalking, killing, and kidnapping are normal things for an obsessive fan to do, right? Obsessive and crazy take a new turn in this edge of your seat drama. For the most part I enjoyed watching this movie. I think some fans are this crazy and know more about an athlete then they are aware of. Robert De Niro plays a great crazy guy, and Wesley Snipes does a great job playing a baseball player who deals with a crazy fan. What I didn't like about this movie is the way that Gil gets into all of this information about Bobby. In real life I didn't think it would be so easy for a fan to get access to where a player lives. He gets access to the bullpen to talk to Bobby on the phone and finds out where #11, another player Juan Primo (Benicio Del Toro), is relaxing at a local spa. How does he do it? He attacks his wife and busts into his house, where she later gets a restraining order and he still shows up at the games and nobody calls the police. Crazy people deserve to be locked up and in this case he doesn't get what he deserves. Watch out all famous athletes--the next psycho stalker fan may be lurking around the corner.