The Fan (1996)
Directed by Tony Scott
When the San Francisco Giants pay center-fielder, Bobby Rayburn $40 million to lead their team to the World Series, no one is happier or more supportive than #1 fan, Gil Renard. When Rayburn becomes mired in the worst slump of his career, the obsessed Renard decides to stop at nothing to help his idol regain his former glory—not even murder.
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What critics compared The Fan to
I can recall a few thrillers like the original STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE FAN.
In this respect, it brings to mind such thrillers as Tony Scott's The Fan (1996) and William Friedkin's Cruising (1980), which were both very good, but hurt by impluasible endings.
Two dozen years after Francis Ford Coppola's great privacy-violation nightmare The Conversation, Tony Scott (who most recently directed The Fan), working, as he did in Top Gun and Crimson Tide, with producer Jerry Bruckheimer (who most recently delivered Armageddon), has come up with a high-adrenaline, high-concept action thriller that mixes hot-button issues of privacy and surveillance, easy-to-identify good and bad guys, attention-getting stars, and well-choreographed chase scenes, then sexes up the works with an array of supercool hardware and software you'll wish you were getting for your birthday.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer ("Crimson Tide," "The Rock," "Armageddon,") is also on a roll and director Tony Scott ("Crimson Tide," "The Fan" and "True Romance") shows a great touch in this film.
Directed by Tony Scott ("Crimson Tide," "The Fan"), "Enemy of the State" has something of saving grace in Gene Hackman, who plays a justifiably paranoid ex-spook that helps Smith stay one step ahead of the NSA.
Sadly, that signature has gotten a lot sloppier over the years, veering away from the accessible slickness of films like "Top Gun," "Crimson Tide" and "True Romance" into a kind of music video-inspired maelstrom of visual excess, starting with "The Fan" in 1996 and continuing through "Enemy of the State" and "Spy Game."
Having over-directed "Days of Thunder," "The Last Boy Scout," "True Romance," "The Fan," and "Enemy of the State" with the same macho scramble, Scott is the go-to guy to turn a screenplay into hot coleslaw.
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Love stories between heterosexual men, if you will, and while this is literalised and even parodied by something like the volleyball scene in Top Gun, it plays out in several of his movies in different ways: the quarrel ending in mutual respect in Crimson Tide, the slow transition from rivals to friends in Days of Thunder, the screwball romantic comedy structure of The Last Boy Scout , the Fatal Attraction -style obsession gone wrong in The Fan .
On the Tony Scott scale of high-gloss quality vs. high-gloss crapola, it ranks much closer to "Crimson Tide" than it does empty vessels of cinematic cool like "Enemy of the State," "Top Gun," "Days of Thunder," "The Fan" or "The Last Boy Scout."