Yet Another Victim Of Keyser Soze Disease

Rating: 6/10 (14 May 2001)

Edgy, disturbing, and hard-hitting in places, `Fight Club' is a decent film that fails to ultimately live up to its initial promise. With a devious, deftly handled opening half-hour, it's actually quite shocking how clumsy and awkward the later stages of `Fight Club' become. It's almost as though director David Fincher so desperately wants the audience to get the point of his film, he's willing to beat the audience of the head with that point - and by doing so, the message of `Fight Club' gets lost.
The film opens with the unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton), a despairing young man who's grown depressed over his boring, uneventful life, which seems to have been ripped straight out of a J. Crew catalog. To alleviate his misery, the Narrator begins attending self-help meetings, but not meetings for depressed people. Instead, he goes to meetings for cancer survivors, drug addicts, abuse victims; by watching the misery of others, the Narrator starts to feel better about his own life. It's perverse and macabre, but it's also handled with wicked brilliance, and this is where `Fight Club' really shines.
Unfortunately, just when the film starts to get good, the Narrator meets two people: Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a woman who also attends self-meetings under false pretenses; and the enigmatic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a charismatic man who, like the Narrator, also feels the strain and depression of being forced to live a homogenized life. Durden's solution to this problem is his Fight Club, which is a group of disillusioned men who strip their lives down to their primitive instincts by beating the crap out of each other and doing other random, anarchic things.
As Durden, much credit should be heaped upon Brad Pitt who's simply awesome in the role; even if the raw concept of `Fight Club' sounds stupid, Pitt, as Durden, speaks about his Fight Club with such passionate conviction that it at least sounds appealing for a few seconds. Unfortunately, no one ever seems to question Durden after they've had time to mull over the concept, and the members of Fight Club remain loyal to a man even after they've gotten their first taste of beating each other to a pulp. What was a clever movie becomes instead oddly fixated on pointless violence, and that's where `Fight Club' starts to lose steam - and some of Durden's later, bigger plans just bring the film to a grinding halt.
Part of Fincher's message in `Fight Club' is to point out the frustrations of the characters and the absurdities of their desperate solutions. However, this message is never clear, and in many ways Fincher instead seems to be glorifying the message of violence instead of condemning it. Fincher's direction is almost too good - it glamorizes violence to the point of looking slick and cool, instead of raw and disturbing, as it needs to be. Fincher has phenomenal visual style, but it unfortunately seems to be exactly what `Fight Club' doesn't need. There's a certain irony to `Fight Club' - the disenfranchised young men belonging to Durden's Fight Club are essentially trading one controlled society for another - but the irony is lost when it is painted with pure adrenaline.
Without giving the ending of `Fight Club' away, I'll just say that it's ineptly handled, and it suffers from the same thing many recent films have been afflicted with: Keyser Soze Disease. There's a revelation at the end of `Fight Club' that's supposed to literally blow the audience away, and profoundly change the events of the entire film (as the revelation of the identity of Keyser Soze in `The Usual Suspects' did for that film). In `Fight Club's case, though, the supposedly shocking ending seems forced, and doesn't make all the prior events of the film seem all that much different. It's shock value for the pure sake of shock, not to enhance the rest of the movie. A number of films since `The Usual Suspects' have relied on this shock-ending gimmick . . . but unless there's a good script to fall back on, this gimmick usually backfires. It definitely backfires in `Fight Club'.
`Fight Club' has a few great moments, and it certainly has the look of a great film. Unfortunately, it's not great. It's a slick, muddled film with a garbled message. Honestly, rent Fincher's `The Game' instead of this film - it has a similar message, except it's much clearer . . . and much better. `Fight Club' is forgettable. Grade: C+