Some books can't be turned into movies...

Rating: 6/10 (26 April 2005)

If this film was a piece of its own, it would not be bad, but anyone who read the book sees: This film misses the monumentality of the book. While reading the book, you are disgusted by this man and his surrounding and get a deep insight into a society which always follows the money, a society which has used the "American Dream" that excessive that it is in danger to die. The reader of the book is bored by Bateman's wealth as he is. The reader misses any human behavior in that book for the first two third of the 550 pages. The reader is shocked by Bateman's only exciting things in his life of purified materialism: His sex and his violence, which is always connected.
To make that book into a film is almost impossible. No sane mind will produce a 4-hour movie which would be immediately banned in most countries. But even when your aim is not a total conversion of the book and all its aspects, you could have made it better. First: The movie is too short! When you read the book and then watch the movie, you are waiting for some long hours to come, but then, after only 100 minutes, the film suddenly is over. There isn't the growing boredom of viewing (or reading of) Bateman going to endless dinners. Second: The crimes of Bateman are belittled! Yes, there is a man running with a chainsaw (a scene that I can't remember from the book, maybe it even wasn't in it), a head in the fridge and some bodies in a wardrobe, but it does not create the shocking atmosphere of the book. Maybe with voice-overs of the original texts, you could have gotten this effect. Third: The surrealism is missing. When in the book, Bateman says to a barkeeper "I want to play with your intestines", the reader is not sure if it is in Bateman's mind or if it is reality. In the film, you see this without questioning it.
All in all the film may be a acceptable movie about a serial killer, but can never be as great as the book.