The originality and craziness almost compensate for the awkwardness throughout

Rating: 7/10 (29 July 2012)

American Psycho (2000)
This isn't quite a dark comedy, not a satire of psycho slasher movies, and not a straight up suspense crime flick, either. Or is it all these things?
It might depend on your sense of humor. If you try to take it seriously, which you shouldn't (the first clue is in the credits when the dripping blood turns out to be a red sauce for a fancy meal), you'll end up mystified and unhappy. If you find this funny, if Christian Bale in this pre-Batman demanding role is really wry and comic for you, you'll love it. Most of the time.
I was somewhere in the middle. Bale is playing a caricature--the overly rich and conceited playboy businessman in the Reagan 80s. But he plays too often the caricature directly rather than letting it come through the performance organically. Sometimes this is fine, or even great, but it puts a little strain on other scenes. (The women I know who saw it or have seen it don't think this matters so much because he's really hot, and really naked, in lots of it. And it's directed by a woman, Canadian Mary Harron who cut her teeth, not surprisingly, with the artsy "Who Shot Andy Warhol.")
The plot is important and clever, and hard to talk about because there are some key twists, the twists becoming really huge by the end. Appropriately. Because above all this is camp. It's hammy without being slapstick. It works best, in a weird example, with the recurring fascination with the business cards among this group of young pampered business jerks. Jealousies over the color of the paper and the quality of the type lead to, well, some unrestrained behavior.
The movie is sometimes bloody for sure, but most of the blood is so gratuitous it isn't quite disturbing. The main character is insane as the title implies--more than you realize at first--and the people around him don't always see him for what he is. Or do they? Or do we?
There are a lot of movie tricks here. Scenes shift reality, or echoes from one situation visually resemble another, and in that sense it's a smartly made. But it also manipulates too openly for anyone trying to actually enter the movie. And "entering' the movie is a mistake. It's all show, and once you realize it's a farce and the characters don't really matter because they don't really exist (it's just a movie, the movie insists), once you realize that you're going to enjoy it more, but also realize it's a capped off experience. It only goes so far.
By the end I wanted it to end. It's an odd, affected, curious, and almost period-defining movie. If you liked slightly odd creepy moves like "American Beauty" which has an odd echo in the title, you might want to give a go.