Fight Club 1999
A lot of people tossed this around as one of the best of last year. But I just don’t see it. I saw a review from Rolling Stone on the box saying how great it was and I think it may fit in with that audience. Like one of those long Rolling Stone articles that no one reads this movie thinks it is far cooler and more clever than it really is and it just goes on forever about nothing. I found myself fast-forwarding over parts because the whole thing had become so silly.
It started out well enough: Edward Norton is an insomniac who finds that it helps him sleep if he goes to support-group meetings and shares the pain of afflictions he doesn’t have (he starts out going to a testicular cancer survivor’s support group). He gets turned off of that by Helena Bonham Carter, who is doing the same thing (including the testicular cancer group and she smokes at the tuberculosis meetings (warning: stupidity begins here)). Fortunately he meets Brad Pitt and they discover that it makes them both feel better if they beat each other up. Fighting, apparently, tells you who you are and what you’re made of (but outside of the movie fighting is just stupid). It goes downhill fast: The idea catches on and hundreds of people start going to Fight Club to beat each other up. Oddly, most of them like getting beat up more than beating someone else up. Pretty soon everyone in town has black eyes and busted lips. For the next 8 hours of the movie (seems like) there are lots of gross scenes with blood spattering all over. Fight Club devolves into Mayhem Club where they do everything from putting emergency procedure brochures in planes (with realistic graphics) to blowing up buildings. Now it’s kind of like Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman, but without his style.
Yeah, there’s a neat twist about two-thirds of the way through and there are some interesting ideas thrown about, and Helena Bonham Carter does a good job, but for the most part this is just a big dumb movie that thinks it is better than it really is. It might appeal to people who don’t know that it’s a big dumb movie, but not to me.
Though on execution this is a D, there are enough neat ideas (plus the plot twist) to bring this up to a C.
Written: 15 Oct 2000