By the time The Fan rolled around in 1996, Tony Scott was in the midst of something of a creative hot streak. Reviews may not have been kind to The Last Boy Scout, and the box office may have been even crueler to True Romance, but both were soon rightfully declared cult treasures which was further bolstered by the fact that impossibly tense submarine thriller, Crimson Tide, managed to do well both financially and critically. However, once again Scott found the fates weren’t especially kind to his next outing, sports based psycho-thriller The Fan, which aimed to pit Robert De Niro against Wesley Snipes in a far more serioius variation of Martin Scorsese’s black comedy, King Of Comedy. Despite featuring all those Tony Scott hallmarks (lush ensemble cast, shocking violence, pulsing needle drops, the most movie-looking movie rain you’ve ever seen), the wind-up and the pitch didn’t seem to be aligned quite right and as a result, The Fan was booed out of the arena. But was that fair? Is it time for Scott’s misunderstood thriller to once again step up to the plate; or will it just strike out once more?
Gil Renard is one of those obsessive baseball fans who is never lost for words when it comes to pontificating about the fortunes of the San Francisco Giants, but while he’s having troubles with his ex-wife and issues at his job as a knife salesman, he’s giddy as a schoolgirl about the news that his beloved team has spend $40 million on a contract with his favorite player, Bobby Rayburn. However, Bobby’s going through something of a rough patch himself as his season hardly gets off to an auspicious start as various factors start chipping away at his confidence. Whether it’s having to promise a home run to a dying Make-A-Wish child who has the same name as his son, the unavailability of his lucky number emblazoned on his shirt, or the actions of young upstarts like Juan Primo and critical radio journalists like Jewel Stern, the constant attack on his superstitions and that phenomenal payday soon get into his head and he soon finds himself into a slump.
However, while the predictably fickle fans start to boo him, the ever loyal Gil sticks by his idol even though his own life starts to crumble. Rapidly losing his grip with reality, the now-former knife salesman takes it upon himself to try and improve Bobby’s fortunes and inadvertently commits murder, however, when Bobby manages to pull his way out of his bad patch, Gil believes that he deserves a thank you at the very least for his efforts. Now stalking his sporting hero, Gil’s admiration soon turns to outrage when he discovers that Bobby doesn’t have the obsessive love for the game that he does. Violently turning on him, the batshit fan takes it upon himself to try and install a need in Bobby to treat baseball as the life and death matter Gil believes that it is. If Bobby’s going to have to protect what he actually loves from this maniacal stalker, he’s going to have to swing for the fences.
After the rain-lashed opening of The Last Boy Scout saw a drug-bitzed Billy Blanks go nuts and shoot up an game of Friday Night Football in order to make a touchdown, I’d been hoping that Tony Scott would make an entire movie that merged sports with some serious thriller energy. However, while The Fan also included a winning formula to be found in another Scott production (Crimson Tide’s young black actor vs old white actor stylings), it seemed that the movie was a guaranteed home run. Regrettably, that wasn’t exactly the case and while a long deserved rewatch didn’t reveal The Fan to be the forgotten classic I was hoping for, it’s still virtually impossible to turn my back on Scott as a filmmaker. While in danger of being accused as an obsessive fan myself, I just can’t hate Scott no matter what movie he chooses to make and while The Fan is certainly flawed, the director’s tone and shooting style manages to salvage a multitude of sins.
I’ve aways suspected that one of the reasons I’ve never been able to get entirely on board with The Fan is that I’m not a sports guy at all, so the obsessive nature of De Niro’s Gil Renard isn’t something that can easily be understood by me. It seems that both the actor and the director have ideas to try and place the rapidly more unhinged Gil somewhere between Michael Douglas’ frustrated D-Fens from Falling Down and De Niro’s own Rupert Pupkin from King Of Comedy, but if we’re supposed to feel any empathy for the antagonist, I just didn’t feel it. In his own, narrow-sighted way, Renard is as delusional and irredeemable as Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes from Misery and after witnessing that he was a pretty shitty human being even before his mental break, the fact that he stabs, bludgeons and kidnaps his way throughout his deranged journey doesn’t really earn the tragic score he gets during the final moments of the film.
However, while the movie arguably handles him a little awkwardly, it’s still pretty cool watching the great man losing his cinematic marbles once more. Demonstrating the sharpness of the knife to a customer by shaving his legs with it may not have the transcendental effect of the “You talkin’ to me?” speech from Taxi Driver, but it’s still certainly unnerving. Similarly, watching him launch foul-mouthed tirades at people giving him the stink-eye for his awful parenting is also worth the price of admission.
Conversely, Wesley Snipes’ Bobby Rayburn isn’t particularly an empathetic character either and I’m tempted to believe that if I was more a sport-guy, I’d have more tolerance for the issues that plague him too – but watching him freak out over not getting to wear his lucky number or visibly recoiling from the sight of the young cancer victim he’s been sent to visit didn’t really endear him to me much. However, despite the fact that both characters are fundamentally unlikable, that doesn’t mean that The Fan doesn’t contain that high-energy charm that comes with the Tony Scott territory. An expansive cast that contains Ellen Barkin’s radio journo, John Leguizamo’s abrasive manager and Benicio del Toro’s cocky upstart all get their respective chances to shine and if that doesn’t float your boat, Scott dutifully stages his final showdown in what looks like torrential rain – although having Gil disguise himself as an umpire feels a little too close to Frank Drebin from The Naked Gun for comfort.
Despite many good points (Scott edits the crack of a baseball bat just as satisfying as a right hook or a bullet to the head), large chunks of The Fan simply refuse to hold together. It feels like all involved are trying to conjure up more than just your average psycho thriller thanks to a lot of romanticism about the nature of sports. But due to the fact that it’s main characters are about as appealing as tooth decay, Scott’s glossy thriller seems in dire need for some obsessive fans of it’s own.
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