The Fan (1996)

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

GENRE: BLANK FROM HELL, THRILLER
SOURCE: STREAMING (AMAZON PRIME)

Tony Scott (RIP) made his debut with The Hunger, a pretty great vampire film that is devastating to watch now that David Bowie is also no longer with us, but he never really returned to the genre, focusing on action movies instead. The closest he came was The Fan, which was one of the last of the '90s run of "______ From Hell" movies like Hand That Rocks The Cradle andPacific Heights (the latter of which Prime suggested to watch next when this one ended), and as it turns out, he didn't even really want to do the movie. He turned the script down twice, apparently, and only returned when De Niro signed on because he was excited about working with him. The film was a flop though, and not well received by those who did see it (or the critics), so he quickly retreated back to his safer world of action flicks with Enemy of the State two years later.

(Side note I find funny: when Scott ended up taking this gig, he was unavailable for The Rock, which Bruckheimer/Simpson wanted him for. One of the leads in The Rock was Michael Biehn, star of the OTHER movie called The Fan, and the two are constantly being confused for one another.) I saw the film when it first hit video, but cropped of course (and being a Sony film, it would be that nauseating version of pan & scan) and with that murky image, so it's like not really seeing it at all anyway. All I really remembered at this point was that the final baseball game was playing in an epic rainstorm on par with the one that opened Scott's Last Boy Scout, except for football that's not out of the question - baseball games stop with anything over a mild drizzle, so it was pretty ridiculous seeing wide shots of the field completely covered in mud, players soaked to the bone and water pouring off their caps. But everything else was a blank, 23 years later, and since I had watched a few others like it for the site I figured it could qualify alongside those other thrillers.

And, to be fair, it is kind of scary at times, because... well, it's friggin Robert De Niro as the psycho! Nowadays he phones everything in, but this is back when he was still giving 100%, and gets to tap into his Travis Bickle/Max Cady energy almost from the start. His character, Gil Renard, doesn't "snap" at a certain point and then turn crazy, in his first few scenes he's clearly already a dirty look away from stabbing someone with the knives he always carries around for his salesman job. Weirdly, the movie is more tense in the first half, before he kills anyone. When he takes his kid to opening day to see his favorite player Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes, also still electrifying before he hit a rough patch in the '00s) make his debut for their local San Francisco Giants, you can easily see him wiping out the rest of his section as he gets into fights with several of the other fans, and even manages to injure his own son trying to catch a fly ball (which he then tries to snatch away from the kid who caught it!). When he makes his first kill in the movie, you almost get a sense it is, perhaps, not his first kill *ever*, a feeling that isn't helped when he visits an old friend in the second half in the film and you can tell the guy is terrified of him as soon as he sees his face.

It's kind of weird is that his son is basically dropped out of the movie at the halfway point, though. These scenes put me in a low key panic, because the kid is pretty young (i.e. my own son's age) so he's still in that "Dad is a superhero" kind of mode that Gil keeps betraying; he leaves him at the game to go to an important work meeting, he reduces him to tears at his Little League practice by screaming at the coach, etc. It's legit heartbreaking to see the kid's expressions as his dad terrifies him with his behavior, even though he is pretty much the only person in the movie Gil doesn't physically harm or threaten. After that, he only appears in a single shot, telling the cops where his dad might be hiding (he then asks "Is my daddy in trouble?" just to twist the knife); 15 seconds of screentime after being such a major focus for the first half. The film is based on a novel, so I can't help but wonder if the family had a bigger part to play there and it just got excised.

On that note it seems like there might have been some trimming beyond the standard paring down of the source material; more than one familiar actor (Richard Riehle and the late Don S. Davis among them) appear in single shots without a line, and while Rayburn's son plays a big part of the third act no mother is ever seen or mentioned, even when Gil kidnaps him and has him held for a full day. Ellen Barkin is also on hand as a sports talk radio jerk, but I can't see what would have attracted her to the role as presented here, as she does almost nothing and occasionally seems thrown into a scene just to justify her casting (why is she running around the stadium at the end as if she was a close friend to the kid?). And we just have to assume Gil killed an actual umpire to manage to get himself on the field for the climax, because he's just suddenly there without much of a setup. Also: he was apparently friends with Mick Jagger? What was all that stuff about?

Curious about the book I looked up some old reviews and they all point out something that's presented as a twist of sorts in the film, that Gilo's obsession with his own baseball past as well as his catcher, "Coop" (Charles Hallahan - Norris!) is spoken about as if it was college/triple A type stuff (i.e. almost in the majors) but revealed to be Little League. It's a pretty good reveal, realizing this poor bastard's one shining moment was over 40 years ago, when he was a little kid with his whole life ahead of him, but if I'm correct in assuming that this information is laid out up front in the novel, it would help get into his head a little more throughout. Until then we think he's just a run of the mill loser with an anger problem, but instead he's been stuck in a fantasy world for decades.

Basically it's one of those movies where everything sounds great on paper, but the execution feels half-baked. Scott doesn't get to exercise much of his flourishes, Snipes' character isn't very compelling despite the movie's occasional attempts to present them as a sort of yin and yang, and while De Niro is scary when called for it, we've seen him do it in better movies. Most of the appeal simply comes from looking at the cast, which includes Benecio Del Toro as a rival player, Jack Black (!) as Barkin's switchboard operator, and Snipes' stunt double, who they don't even bother to try to hide in an actual closeup. And if they didn't change it I could say the same about the location; the book is set in Boston with Bobby playing for the Red Sox, which would have made more sense for Gil's obsession with the team winning a pennant due to the (now broken) "curse" that produced its fair share of overzealous fan behavior. Maybe I'll just track the book down, it's probably better.

What say you?

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