

In the harrowing early scenes of ''The Fan,'' Robert De Niro burrows so
deeply into the soul of Gil Renard, an unstable baseball nut whose life
is coming apart, that you share his panic and helpless fury, even while
loathing him for the emotionally stunted bully that he is. These
unnerving scenes, in which Gil is fired from his job as a salesman of
hunting knives and his bitter ex-wife obtains a court order barring him
from seeing his young son, are directed by Tony Scott in a style that
hurls Gil's humiliations in your face like pitchers of ice water.
But
before ''The Fan'' is even half over, it turns the wrong corner and goes
almost as haywire as its central character. What begins as an ugly case
history of an unstable loser brutally slapped around by life suddenly
becomes a shallow clanking thriller that pulls the rug out from under
Mr. De Niro. Once Gil begins to stalk his playing-field idol, Bobby
Rayburn (Wesley Snipes), the movie starts viewing Gil not as a human
being but a symbolic one-dimensional monster who has to be tracked down
and shot.
Mr. De Niro soldiers on from this unfortunate turning point,
efficiently shuffling through his repertory of creepy psychotic
expressions, from menacingly obsequious Halloween grin to apoplectic
homicidal scowl. But with no character left to play, his skillful
mugging is to little avail. Diminished into the movie's garish fantasy
of a celebrity stalker, he is forced over and over to proclaim
variations on its one unoriginal idea: that fans of celebrities,
especially the most impassioned ones, confuse themselves with their
idols, and woe be the star who isn't properly grateful for the
adulation.
The object of Gil's obsession is a center fielder and Bay Area
hometown hero who has just signed a new $40 million contract with the
San Francisco Giants. As the baseball season begins, Bobby falls into a
slump that is so severe that the fans begin booing him. The
superstitious Bobby blames his poor performance on the fact that a
high-flying teammate, Juan Primo (Benicio Del Toro) wears his old
number, 11. Bobby is so desperate to reclaim the number he is willing to
buy it back, but it can't be had at any price.
Gil, who has had a couple of conversations with Bobby on a call-in
radio show, empathizes so thoroughly with his hero that he takes matters
into his own hands. Barging fully dressed into a hotel steam room where
Juan is unwinding, he begs Juan to give Bobby back his old number. When
Juan, who has had the number 11 actually branded onto his shoulder,
laughs at him, Gil pulls out one of his trusty knives, and the mayhem
begins.
Before it's over, Gil has kidnapped and terrorized Bobby's young son,
who is the same age as his own boy. The drama screeches to a ludicrous
climax in which a furious rainstorm interrupts a ball game whose
life-and-death agenda depends on Bobby's slamming a home run and
publicly dedicating it to his stalker.
As ''The Fan'' turns into a horror cartoon, it loses track of
subsidiary characters who gave its early scenes a harsh satiric bite.
Bobby's cynical agent (John Leguizamo) and a tough, ambitious sports
announcer (Ellen Barkin) who interviews Bobby during his slump virtually
disappear from the film, and one is left with Mr. De Niro's generic
stalker and his prey, Mr. Snipes in his usual genially arrogant mode,
playing cat and mouse. The film's elegantly tricky cinematography and
ominous, pounding score by Hans Zimmer (provocatively juxtaposed with
the Rolling Stones), only underline the emptiness behind its technical
flash.