Paced excruciatingly slow, American Psycho fails on all levels

Rating: 2/10 (19 September 2000)

When I read this book in the mid-eighties, one of the most interesting aspects of it was its listing of the items that seemed to intrigue the consumerism aspects of the yuppie's soul. Sure the book was horrificly violent as it followed Patrick Bateman on his random acts of homicidal violence, but it was a quick read--thought provoking, disturbing and over soon. Many hated the literary qualities of the book as the prose was based on a shopping list quality that I thought made the book even more intriguing. The movie starts off interesting as Bateman, played by Christian Bale, who should win an Oscar for overacting, tells the viewer of his facial cleansing regime and I'm thinking this is going to be pretty good. But that's where the fun ends and the movie begins simply following Bateman from one grisly incident to another. Problem with this is these scenes are not interesting. They show us nothing about the soul of Bateman and seem intended as nothing more than shock value. The premise of the book which was the utter shallowness of yuppie consumerism has been lost.
Not only is the film painfully slow, it is dull to the point that I was glancing at the clock every ten minutes. I soon realized that director Mary Harron's film is not an interesting piece about one man's utter descent into madness, glazed over with his yuppie pretensions, but a film about a killer that offers the viewer nothing more than your average slasher film. At least your average slasher film has some suspense where Harron's film has none of that. AMERICAN PSYCHO could have been a great movie, but obviously it got into the wrong hands and ends of being a cold passionless story about a man that stirs absolutely no emotions in the viewer.