The Fan: C-

Like Cape Fear? Welcome to a wonderland of type-casting where you can re-experience some of the DeNiro dementia as he plays Gil, a knife wielding baseball fanatic who stalks major league baseball’s biggest slugger, played by tax evading martial arts vampire Wesley Snipes.

If you thought it was going to be a movie about a possessed ceiling fan or something, you are just plain fucking wrong and obviously didn’t use context clues while viewing the above image from the movie. This is a pretty average thriller in which we see escalating scenes of stalking and violence. DeNiro has tons of knives and makes his trademark “it smells like shit in here” face whenever he hits a roadblock during his stalking or whenever Snipes rejects his slightly homoerotic and obsessive advances. At one point, Gil cuts a dude’s tattoo off. That’s pretty funny.

You should check out the Rotten Tomatoes reviews for this. They are so polarized and laced with bad baseball puns. Critics can’t decide if the movie is a “home run” or “out.”

Anyway, Gil kidnaps Snipes’s son and demands that he dedicate a homerun to him or his kid is getting shanked. It’s like The Make a Wish Foundation on crack! The climax is so stupid that I felt a little cheated. I actually really enjoy suspenseful thrillers in which the antagonist uses his/her brains to manufacture conditions ideal for some stalking. I like the sociopathic manipulation and the methodical planning. So when this movie, which does depend on and include this sort of guile, wrapped up in like two minutes with a police showdown on the field of a major league baseball game, I was a bit upset. It was just really abrupt.

I feel like the action-y ending is what Scott (the director) was probably most excited about. Action movies are what he was best at, even if it sometimes looks like Michael J Fox was doing the camera work during action scenes.  All in all, not a bad movie and worth a watch.