I was aware that this wasn't one of De Niro's better films before I sat down to watch it but I was prepared to give it a chance and see if it would throw any surprises my way, but unfortunately it didn't. It wasn't the really really terrible film that I had been led to beleive but it just wasn't anything special at all, the character that De Niro plays in the movie is basically a piece of every psycho that he's ever played put together to play a character that's just as run-of-the-mill as the movie that he appears in.
The plot of the movie in short is that De Niro plays Gil Renard, a baseball fan who can get a little obsessive about things at times. This time he winds up getting a bit over friendly with baseball star Bobby Rayburn so much so that he kills one of his team mates for him and then kidnaps Rayburn's kid, who he threatens to kill unless Rayburn hits a home run in his next match and dedicates it to him.
All this sounds like it could have made a reasonably good movie but for some reason The Fan just didn't work. Maybe it's because we've seen this type of thing all to often before - crazy stalker does something naughty and then we have to find him before something even worse happens. Or it could have been that despite this semi-decent idea the script kinda sucked and there wasn't anything extra in it to make it remotely interesting and so the movie just goes from the start to the end in one dead straight line. Whatever the problem with the movie was (and it undoubtably has some) it just didn't work for me and confirmed what I had heard about it before hand.
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