A movie with a superb begininnig and a brainless ending

Rating: 4/10 (16 December 1999)

This is not a movie that would have normally raised any interest in me. However, when The Fight Club first arrived in Spain, the reviews and critiques that it received in the press where extremely negative, perhaps the worst critiques i have ever heard towards a movie. This raised my curiosity substantially, and after watching the movie, I did agree with some of the things the critics had warned about.
Nevertheless, I must say that the movie begins impressively, the analytical depiction of our western culture and the lifeless void that surrounds it, with some great touches of humour, is very impressive. One cannot help but to relate to the movie, because the emptiness under which Edward Norton's character lives is something that most people in our modern day societies can really identify with; it depicts a society in which materialism and consumerism are our only sources of pleasure, from which we get short-lived doses of excitement delivered from our material purchases. The director managed to display the most average man who had a normal job, flat, decoration, etc, someone who we could see as our equal, someone on our level. The familiarity one feels towards him should really be disturbing, yet it is not, mainly because after a re-count, he is a normal, integrated, productive member of our western society. He is what is hoped for and expected from all of us.
The sad thing is that the director who started a movie, which I (up to that point) would have awarded 10 of 10, ended up delivering a movie, which I rated with a 4 of 10. The beginning is excellent, but half an hour into the movie or so, it is as if the director had introduced a completely different movie. From that point on it goes from bad to worse, and turning into another typical mindless Hollywood movie, with an unnecessary level of violence and a storyline which deteriorated by the minute and a precipitated ending that delivered nothing and just fouled those magnificent initial 30 minutes.