The Fan

Based on a book by Peter Abrahams, The Fan follows Robert De Niro’s unhinged knife salesman Gil Renard as a series of personal misfortunes lead him to fixate entirely on a top-ranked baseball player (Wesley Snipes’ Bobby Rayburn). There’s ultimately little within The Fan worth getting wholeheartedly (or even partially) excited about, as the movie, for the most part, plays like a paint-by-numbers thriller that hits many of the touchstones one might’ve anticipated – with the decidedly less-than-engrossing atmosphere compounded by an absence of surprising (or even interesting) plot twists and a thoroughly lackadaisical sense of pacing (ie the film just drags for most of its overlong running time). The mediocre atmosphere is perpetuated by De Niro and Snipes’ competent yet far-from-enthralling work here, although it’s worth noting that the movie does display flashes of something better when it focuses on Gil and Bobby’s respective downward spirals (ie this might’ve been more effective as a low-key character study, ultimately). It’s perhaps not surprising to note that the faux-intense third act does the film absolutely no favors, with the anticlimactic and surprisingly interminable nature of this stretch ensuring that The Fan ends on as underwhelming a note as one could possibly envision – thus confirming the movie’s place as a lesser entry within Scott’s exceedingly erratic filmography.

** out of ****