After Good Start, Falls Apart

Rating: 7/10 (17 July 2010)

During the 1980s, a Wall Street yuppie leads an alternate life as a serial killer. This starts out as a delicious black comedy, with Bale delivering a terrific performance as a man who is not only a cold-blooded killer but a connoisseur of pop music. It's quite amusing listening to him analyze the music of Huey Louis and Whitney Houston. Unfortunately, the film falls apart down the stretch. Harron's direction is crisp, but the screenplay fails to reach a satisfactory conclusion, perhaps a difficult feat to pull off given the nature of the source novel. There are too many loose ends and the ending is much too ambiguous.