Not a bad movie, but not a great one either

Rating: 5/10 (13 February 2006)

Fight Club is not a bad movie, per se, but it really does not deserve all the credit that is given to it for being such an awesome movie. It started out fine, I was enjoying myself, well, not necessarily enjoying it, but I liked that it was mentally stimulating - I can respect that about Fight Club. But then the movie just turned....weird. The idea of these characters being part of an underground fight club was not a bad idea, but what the filmmakers did with it might have been. There was a book written about it, and the book focuses much more on the psychological aspect of all that is going on. Obviously, Fight Club is also a very intensely psychological film, but it doesn't seem to entirely know what it is doing with this.
It is a movie with no particular teaching in mind or direction in its step. It is a movie in which the director, through intertwining suspense, violence and dialogue, tries to pound into the viewer some sort of questioning or some sort of thing to make us think. Unfortunately, because of the director's attempt to make the viewer ask questions, what comes onto the screen is a jumble of jargon, the focal point of which is the fighting, not the psychological aspects. Occasional mention of sex is thrown in liberally, and somehow made to fit into the plot line, but on the whole it seems kind of useless. The movie to me was just confusing and really not that great. Like I said, it's not a bad film, it just isn't all that.
I like plot twists in movies, and the plot twist in Fight Club wasn't all that bad. In fact, it might have made the movie. But there were several factors that didn't work for me. One was the way the plot twist seemed just kind of tossed in there. I mean, obviously, it is integral to the whole story, but I could tell that if the entire storyline was looked at completely intensely, every piece would not fit into place. In the Sixth Sense, every last piece fit perfectly. In Fight Club, it obviously didn't. Also, the ending of the movie kind of spoiled the whole thing for me. The guy shoots himself in the mouth, stays alive for several minutes afterward, and everything continues on as it was going too, except for the fact that Edward Norton's character is going to die. What the heck!? The entire movie just seems confusing for the sake of being confusing. It believes that if a movie is thought-provoking, it is automatically classified as good. That is not necessarily true. I could take a bucket of truth and have characters in a movie speak several twisted versions of it, toss it into a setting, a story, and a climax, and call it a movie, but that doesn't mean it's good. Too much of Fight Club seems like this. Yes, it is very thought-provoking. My thoughts were provoked. Yet there is something integral missing, that piece of movie-making that makes other movies good, and the lack of it leaves Fight Club somewhere in that place between a strange movie and a great movie.