Chopping Spree

Rating: Null/10 (9 April 2000)

Mary Harron's "American Psycho" is a merry prankster nightmare. A cheerfully irreverent drawing room slasher movie about a natty young Wall Street serial killer, who for all his smug ruthlessness is also the film's anxious, cringing conscience. He's a macho monster who's all aquiever on the inside. Harron, has worked a kind of alchemy on Bret Easton Ellis' infamous 1991 novel, which turned homicide into the ultimate blatant metaphor for yuppie heartlessness. The book was a manufactured scandal - a show boat catalog of brand names and body parts, all engineered to call attention to Ellis' hate-chic "audacity." Harron eliminates most of the author's graphic, nearly surgical grisliness and the ugly currents of misogyny as well (the killer's delight in hacking up woman may have been the book's single deepest emotion.) She stages the blood splattered violence as stylized tongue in cheek spectacle, complete with chain saws and gleaming axes, that's as kicky and easy to watch as say the murders in the "Scream" films. Funny, pungent and weirdly gripping, "American Psycho" is a satire that feels like a hallucination. The film doesn't entirely work; it's confounding when it should be haunting. Yet Christian Bale as the psychotic keeps Patrick lurching blindly toward humanity, until we see a self being born in a man who, paradoxically was too selfish to have one.