As empty as the era it ridicules

Rating: 2/10 (23 February 2003)

This review contains spoilers.
This movie doesn't know what it wants to be. It's too serious to be a black comedy, too gruesome to be a comedy, too funny to be a drama, too narrow-mined to be satirical, and too broad to be a character study. In short, American Psycho takes the middle road so often that the end result is a weak, ineffectual film that promises more than it delivers.
Just in case you don't know that this film takes place in greed-driven 1980s (oh right, like the 1990s internet explosion had nothing to do with greed), gigantic cordless phones, 1980s music, power suits, whitewashed Malibu walls, and odd menu choices like `sea urchin ceviche' are jammed into your senses. With all of these blatant era-placement devices, you just know that during the writing of the script someone must have quipped about `instant culture immersion via baseball bat.' I'm surprised they didn't stick a Neiman poster on the wall. By the way, why aren't any of the women actors wearing those huge shoulder pads that were so popular in the 1980s?

Christian Bale, as the yuppie Patrick Bateman, is pretty good in this otherwise vapid film. The men are broadly-painted cliches of the typical 1980s ivy-league archetype: snotty and oily-haired, with mannerisms akin to those of car salesmen or insurance agents, engaged in a culture of their own that we as viewers are supposed to ridicule, not just because it is the 1980s but because they were born priveleged, have nicknames like `Biff', and will someday die not in a smelly hospital but in the comfort of their own home on a four-hundred-year-old poster bed attended to by a private nurse.
Several things don't make sense: when the prostitute ran screaming down the hall, pounding on doors, why didn't any of the residents open their doors? Why don't we ever see Bateman doing any work instead of just listening to music or going to lunch? How could you kill someone with a nail gun? And just what happened at the end, was Paul Allen alive or dead? I don't understand this film at all.
This film is as pretty and sterile as Patrick Bateman's condo, and, like much of the 1980s, offers little substance.