disappointing only because it shows flashes of brilliance...

Rating: 7/10 (23 September 2000)

Spoiler alert
One scene describes the basic problem - Bateman moving nervously, secretively and giddily through his apartment, gathering the essential tools (an axe, a raincoat) while espousing to a co-worker/soon to be victim, the merits of Huey Lewis and the News in a staccato cadence, and then... - an implied murder. No shots of the victim getting axed, just shots of an enraged Bateman swinging an axe and getting blood spurted up onto his face.

If your going to make a movie based on Bret Easton Ellis' notorious novel, you better have the guts to go all the way. You can't choose one of the more disturbing books on the shelf, and then fail to utilize the very parts of the book that make it disturbing.
And that's really the crux of the matter. The direction is quite excellent in parts, and my kudos to the director for knowing how to frame a shot really, really well. Christian Bale's performance is fantastic. He is 100% believable as a psychopath. (actually I'm convinced that anybody who owns more than one Whitney Houston album is more than slightly disturbed) The look and feel of the film are perfect. What's missing is the heavy body blows that the story requires. The excruciating gore, the torture, the ON SCREEN violence, in the book, all of these things are intended to at first juxtapose against and then gradually blend into his Yuppie Scum lifestyle. (He's supposedly clean cut, but he's actually a serial killer. He's supposedly a perfect catch, but he's frighteningly misogenistic, just like the culture and the era) To "get" the disturbed point, that all these 80's wall-street shop-till-you-drop, in-crowd, reservation having, business card dropping, homophobic, sexist, racist pigs are indistinguishable from the worst kind of monsters and practice on a societal level what the monsters practice on a personal level... to "get" the point you need the most vicious contrast possible. That's why ellis wrote it in the first place. The end doesn't make any sort of sense unless the violence and gore is too horrible to imagine. Then you can see that possibly, just possibly this was all some sort of twisted fantasy... in the movie it just looks like he got away with the whole thing.

Decent movie 7 out of 10, worth watching for Bale's superb performance and the director's competent work, burdened most likely by the industry and censors who wouldn't know an allegory if it walked up and killed them with a chainsaw.