If It's a Joke, It Got By Me.

Rating: 3/10 (14 May 2007)

I didn't read the novel, only reviews of the novel, but I'm not sure that makes too much difference. A movie more or less stands on its own two feet. Or else it pretty much drops as dead as this one does.
It has two very good features: (1) the performances, especially Christian Bale's as the homicidal loony, and (2) the art direction. You've never seen such opulence, spare and shiny and sterile.
The problems lie with the script. It takes us through the days in the life of Patrick, who begins his mornings with some kind of horrifying bikini wax all over his face, then lounges around his office competing for nasty cracks with the rest of the boys, and ends up with mayhem of a particularly gory sort.
I couldn't put the climactic reveal through any kind of step-down transducer that made sense. You mean "it was all a dream"? I didn't find the blood sickening but found the characters and their values to be enough to gag a maggot -- excepting the winsome Chloe Sevigny and Willem DaFoe's affably ironic detective. The rest of them were about as appalling as the characters in "Bonfire of the Vanities." Who wants to sit through such a parade of narcissism for two hours? Don't we get enough of that from Washington?
And this thing has been described as a comic/horror film. The phrase lends new meaning to the word "comic". What the hell is funny about it? Listening to Bateman's spiels about how deeply profound 1980s rock was? Is that funny? Or waltzing around in a plastic raincoat while preparing to chop a colleague into bits? Is THAT somehow amusing? Well. I'm kind of thinking it over and, yeah, I guess there is one comic element to the film. It's that it was taken seriously.
There's a moral lesson here though. Please take this down. Yes, it will be on the exam. A slasher movie doesn't become a good feature film just because you've spent a lot of money on it and based it on a best-selling novel. Now pardon me while I go slit a vein.