The Fan

Sports salaries have skyrocketed in the last two decades. But let’s face it, professional sports have never been so much a game as it is a business. But as the zeros compound at the end of wages and bench warmers started making millions for drinking Gatorade and getting the best seats in the park, fans have become increasingly cynical. Add to that the fact that players jump from team to team following a trail of greenbacks as though they were Hansel and Gretel, team loyalty has been called into question. This is the overriding attitude of Tony Scott’s thriller, The Fan, a film with lots of great ideas yet none of them come to fruition.

Gil Renard (Robert De Niro) is struggling. A knife salesman, he’s not fulfilling his quotas and his boss is getting on his case. Split from his wife, Gil’s looking forward to taking his son out to the San Francisco Giants season opener. There’s renewed hope for the team with the off-season signing of Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes), one of the game’s best players and a hometown boy to boot.

Bobby’s come to San Francisco with a massive new contract, one that many are questioning, but not Gil. Loyal to his team he frequents call-in radio shows to pledge his support. At first, it’s borderline creepy but not uncommon from what you see on TV and hear on regular radio. Healthy or not, sports has a way of bringing out peoples’ passions. But as time goes by and things get progressively worse for Gil, his passion moves into the realm of the psychotic. When Bobby goes into a major slump, Gil stops at nothing to make sure that his man-crush comes through and starts helping his beloved Giants again.

As with most Scott film, The Fan offers a lot of style and exaggeration. His love for excess is one of the things I love about his work. He’s unapologetic about using flair to get more out of his material, all the while making it a distinct signature that is instantly recognizable. Although not as big a set of fireworks as some of his more recent films, The Fan is certainly visually louder than I envision the script being. It adds tension at time and certainly brings out the seedy side of all the characters, psychotic or not.

The Fan starts out as something that could easily have been pulled from reality. Released not long after the Major League Baseball strike, people were very cynical (and still are) towards athletes signing contracts worth tens of millions of dollars per season. Phoef Sutton’s script tries to capture this sentiment but then takes it to a new level that takes it from realistic to preposterous. It’s at this point that he and Scott lost me. Although creepy and a borderline psychopath, I had a hard time buying the extreme depths of Gil’s dissension. This leads to numerous awkward scenes in the second half that aren’t only believable but they’re uncomfortable to watch.

The Fan comes to the plate with a good premise. But it goes down swinging, becoming too silly and unbelievable. For an excellent look at sports obsession I much prefer the 2009 independent film Big Fan written and directed by Robert D. Siegel.