Enjoyable.

Rating: 6/10 (16 August 2007)

American Psycho is a very elegantly produced film. It features some excellent photography, and it's a gripping experience. It is not a film that will one-day be seen as a classic of cinema, but it is enjoyable and entertainingly obscene, watching "American Psycho" is like witnessing a bravura sleight-of-hand feat. In adapting Bret Easton Ellis's turgid, gory 1991 novel to the screen, the director Mary Harron has boiled a bloated stew of brand names and butchery into a lean and mean horror comedy classic. The transformation is so surprising that when the movie's over, it feels as if you've just seen a magician pull a dancing rabbit out of a top hat.
Four years ago Ms. Harron's film "I Shot Andy Warhol" performed similar magic by creating credible facsimiles of Warhol and his motley entourage. "American Psycho," a more ambitious, far more confident film, salvages a novel widely loathed for its putative misogyny and gruesome torture scenes by removing its excess fat in a kind of cinematic liposuction. Except for a few wittily chosen lists, the book's numbing catalog of high-end consumer items has been drastically edited. Its murder rate has also plunged. The trimming demonstrates once again that less is often more. What remains of the story is a sleek, satirical, yuppie-era "Jekyll and Hyde" that blithely tap dances along the fault lines separating movie genres. At the heart of the film is a star-making performance by the handsome Welsh actor Christian Bale (adopting an impeccably snooty pseudo-preppie American accent) that softens the novel's portrait of a serial-killing Wall Street hotshot just enough to force us to identify with this ultimate narcissist. Mr. Bale's portrayal of 27-year-old Patrick Bateman, a budding master of the universe by day (he works in mergers and acquisitions, which he facetiously refers to as "murders and executions") and homicidal maniac by night, is alternately funny, blood-curdling and pathetic. American Psycho is not for all tastes, but for ones that enjoy a good thriller and can stomach blood curdling violence.