A yuppie becomes a serial-killer and slays everything from cats to old ladies.

Rating: Null/10 (30 December 2006)

Most of the gory details were avoided, which is probably the only interesting thing in a book which delves on the Reagan era and how evil and egotistical it was - if the movie is anything to go by. What a boring old left-wing point to make. How original and insightful! We are presented with a psychopath who is supposed to be funny as well as menacing. To mix satire or even comedy with this genre is truly stupid and cannot come to any good. Plus, a couple of scenes are dumb in the "Nightwatch" or "Copycat" or even "Hitcher" vein: Bateman kills a fleeing hooker by throwing a running chainsaw down a flight of stairs - as if he spent all his life practicing for such an occasion. Of course, no one - in that large New York building - is there to see or hear the prostitute's screams or to see and hear a blood-soaked Bateman running through the hallways nude and with a chainsaw in his hands. (But perhaps the unfeeling, insensitive 80s are to blame and its selfish 80s inhabitants.) It is also unexplained how exactly he manages to clean the blood and drag the body up five or six floors to his flat without anyone seeing him and without leaving a bloody mess all over the place. But the nonsense doesn't end there. He also kills an old woman because she saw him pointing a gun at a cat (plenty of stray cats in Manhattan, of course) and after that he goes on a killing spree after which he weeps and confesses his crimes to a lawyer by phone. A psychopath with a guilty conscience?! Later, he meets the lawyer and tells him that he is Bateman and that the phone message was no joke, and that he killed the character Paul. To this the lawyer says that he had dinner with Paul twice in the last ten days! What the hell is that?? Did he imagine it all? Yet there is no indication at all that he imagined it all. And even if he had: what's the point?! Plus, he doesn't seem like the type of serial killer who would be dumb enough to try and kill his secretary, especially since a detective already hangs around him a lot.
It was clear to me from the very start of the preparations for the making of this movie that there was a lack of seriousness about it: they wanted Di Caprio to play the lead! Di Caprio the serial killer. No wonder the movie turned out so bad. Considering this, then maybe Bale wasn't such a bad choice. They actually fixed Bale's very English teeth so that they would look "perfect", i.e. yuppie-like, for the role. Instead, it looks as if he is wearing one of those very cheap, fake, bright-white vampire teeth (minus the fangs).
So what have we learned from this mess? Serial-killer thrillers are hitting new lows (i.e. highs) in stupidity, and bad novels should not be filmed. This piece of crap even has a sequel.