A dark, intriguing and haunting film about.... NOTHING!!!

Rating: 2/10 (27 September 2013)

So, there was once a loser, a guy who is so depressed and alienated by society and his job that he has to join different self-help groups, even though he does not suffer from the conditions of the attendants, just to find some human warmth. Suddenly an unfortunate incident leaves him homeless, and he turns to a recently met friend for help. This means a dramatic change in his life, his friend is handsome, strong, full of self-confidence, charismatic, bold, audacious, that is, just the opposite from him, and the one he would maybe like to become. And his friend opens for him a sort of liberation path, through fight!, the most basic and primitive of human instincts; first between them, then starting a club of fighters who meet every week to release their life frustrations through violence and direct hand-to-hand combat. The other most primitive human instinct, sex, appears abruptly too, but it's not him, but his friend whom becomes the sex partner of the girl he likes. Most of the film time is spent in the development of the fight club, which gets bigger, with some of its members going to live to the friend house (much to the displeasure of the protagonist), and then finally turning into a sort of protest/sabotage/terrorist group.
And suddenly his friend disappears, and in his search for him the protagonist discovers that his friend founded many other fight clubs in other cities.
And here the "great" moment of the film comes!... the protagonist discovers that his friend is actually... himself!!, it is a fictional personage created by his own mind, the person he would like to be, the embodiment of his ambitions, of everything he admires... and hates all at once, the fictional being through whom he takes revenge on the senseless world he lives in. And thus we are forced to completely change our perspective and interpret the whole story under a totally new point of view, and it is just then when we realize the story we have been told is about.... NOTHING AT ALL!!!.... liberation through violence and sex?? oh yeah! we might believe that if the end of the film showed us something different from a guy meekly pleading his lady to come back with him, something different form a guy horrified at the tragical consequences the acts of violence he has promoted have had. Regret from having departed so much from the established social order?? it just does not make sense.
Then we start to think of the internal coherence of the story, and we find so many plot holes and so much inconsistency that the whole film literally deflates into nothing but a bunch of senseless violent scenes and a ridiculously pretentious and void criticism-against-the-system message.
Probably one of the most overrated films at IMDb, a perfect example of a film which should have never been made.