Movie Quote by Bernie Lincicome

The jab lands because it treats celebrity obsession as both inevitable and faintly ridiculous. Bernie Lincicome isn’t reviewing The Fan so much as reviewing the cultural machinery that makes a thriller about fandom feel plausible. The first clause shrugs at Robert De Niro’s screen persona: of course he’s stalking someone again. De Niro has long been Hollywood’s patron saint of simmering fixation, so the “hardest thing to believe” isn’t the actor’s behavior but the audience’s. That inversion is the joke, and it’s a neat bit of critic’s misdirection: we’re primed to think the implausibility is cinematic, then he points to the real absurdity living off-screen.

The subtext is a mild contempt for the modern sports-industrial complex, where the athlete becomes an object onto which strangers project identity, status, and grievance. A baseball player, in this framing, isn’t a hero so much as a screen for other people’s unmet needs. Lincicome’s line also carries a faint generational sneer at how fame migrates: baseball is “America’s pastime,” yet he implies its stars still shouldn’t command the devotional mania reserved for rock gods or movie icons. And yet they do, which is why the film can exist.

Contextually, it’s a mid-90s moment when sports celebrity, talk radio, and tabloid culture are accelerating, and thrillers are increasingly about obsession itself. The sentence works because it flatters the reader’s skepticism while admitting, with a grim smile, that mass attention has become the most believable monster in the room.