Pretty much as you'd expect.

Rating: 3/10 (7 June 2000)

If you were to make a satire of the American 80s, that infamous, hollow, bombastic, ultra-materialist, cruel decade, how would you do it? Would you have a male hero, in this decade of Rambo, Arnie and Gordon Gekko, where even women wanted to be men? Would you fetishise minimalism - elaborately tiny meals; shiny apartments with hardly any furniture etc. - to emphasise the spiritual emptiness of the decade? Would you foreground the most ghastly, soulless, manufactured music to demonstrate the assembly-line reduction of emotions? Would you mock the obsession with restaurants, big suits, vanity products, the mimicking of a 20s aristocracy sieved of all Gatsbyesque romance; where new, utility products don't make life easier, but serve to alienate you further from you 'loved' ones, your peers, your surroundings? Would you show how, beneath the civilised sheen, the most barbaric ritual rites retain (and I'm not just talking about the serial killing)? Would your hero be so obsessed with appearance, image (lots of mirrors and reflections), fitting in, that he would cease to be himself, that he would be alienated from himself, that he would become a literal double of himself with nothing inside? Would you show the abuse of marginal figures such as the homeless? Would you compare all this to the obscenities of the Reagan era?
Sounds easy, doesn't it? And that, if I may say so under IMDb guidelines, is the problem with AMERICAN PSYCHO - it goes for the easy option every time. It is no excuse to argue that the film is thin and superficial, that its satire is far too broad, because so was the decade. By making this American psycho so ridiculous, so harmlessly, buffoonishly camp; by making the kind of emasculated satirical swipes a Republican might enjoy; only evades the true moral decadence of the era.
The device of suggesting that everything that Bateman does is a mere projection of his fantasies, in the way the whole decade was a paralysing projection of materialist fantasies, goes back at least as far as LAURA, but whereas that classic tried to deconstruct the image of the police detective, and the very real authority invested in him, Bateman is just a dork, as everyone says. He is too silly to be scary, his social position isn't adequately delineated to make him powerful.
This in itself is satirical - what DOES Bateman do to make so much money? Is he really daddy's boy, or just another wannabe vice-president among dozens? Why does he pick his particular victims? In Paul Allen's case it's clear enough, immature envy. But why prostitutes and the homeless (echoes of Bunuel, Kubrick, Ferrera)? Because they refuse to conform to the glorious 80s ethic, they don't want to fit in like he does, they give the lie to his era's self-confidence? Because they exist on the margin, as he would truly like to? But he is as 'unproductive' and marginal as they are. Donald Kimball is set up as some kind of doppelganger (the film seems very indebted to Poe; or is this a nod to 80s academic theory?), but this kind of disintegrates as the plot breaks down, presumably to mirror its protagonists increasing madness.
The style is as anonymous as its subject - again, correspondence between form and content isn't really enough; CLAIRE DOLAN has shown how the evocation of a soulless environment can be made critically meaningful. The lack of budget deadens the impact of the action hero climax. If the film has a saving grace, it is the performance of Christian Bale, effecting, for some reason, an excellent impression of Jim Carrey, doing what he can to wring laughs from the predictable material (the BEN-HUR-like threesome is hilarious). I watched DRILLER KILLER after this, a real American psycho whose trauma is rooted in an emotional crisis Bateman can never have because he is, as he says, a cipher.