A dreadful comic investigation of human mind...

Rating: 8/10 (1 November 2001)

Guys, you have to see this movie! Well, actually you'd better read the book first. You'll be shocked by the book. I'm not that delicate, and i'm used to fearful violent readings, but i admit i had to shut the book close, at times, cause i couldn't bear imagining the situations described in it.
The movie's softer. It explores the black-comedy side the book already had, conceiling and leaving to your imagination the massacres, the tortures, the killing. The movie won't show you Patrick murdering a kid at the zoo; it won't show you what Patrick does to his victims' eyes.
But it succeeds anyway in making you understand. In taking you to the place Bret Easton Ellis wanted to take you to: the misery and the social violence of the eighties will be in front of you. The emptiness, the shallowness and the stupidity of those years will be in front of your eyes, and you will get to understand how a young man could reach the point of imagining to perpetuate such indescribable crimes, of wishing it. He will imagine so, he will wish so just tell himself he's alive. Killing, murdering, torturing, raping...all those actions (beware, he only imagines them...) represent a form of rebellion against a superficial society, where business cards are status symbol, and where you'd better have a very elegant one in your pocket if you don't want to be rejected by society. Where persons don't have a name, don't have an identity...cause they all look the same... on that background, killing is living, torturing is shouting out at the world "look, i have a personality, i'm not just another one of those guys you see out there", raping is surviving.
The movie shows all that, with a lighter touch than the book but with almost the same effectiveness. Cold lights, perfect settings, good writing. And one last, important ingredient: a huge Christian Bale...his performance is stunning. He is Patrick Bateman, he is all of us.