A movie that looks so good but feels so bad

Rating: 7/10 (12 March 2003)

Who can resist the teaming of actors like Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham-Carter? Although David Fincher has come up with a few movies people didn't care for, he is also responsible for thrillers like "Seven" and "The Game." And this movie is a let-down because I want so much to like it, but when I really think, it's not that good! The movie begins like somewhat of a black comedy. Norton is a white-collar office worker going through a state of depression in which he attends meetings with victims of various kinds of cancer. He befriends a testicular cancer patient named Bob (Meat Loaf) and discovers that a woman named Marla (Bonham-Carter) is going to all the same places.
He meets Tyler Durden (Pitt) on a plane. Tyler owns his own soap business and from the start we know he's more than he says. Tyler and Edward Norton find therapy in beginning an underground bare-knuckle fight club in which men compete for fun and derive some sort of perverse pleasure from beating each other's brains in. The first few fights are actually somewhat entertaining, but as they progress they become more graphic and more tasteless. Tyler seems to disappear at one point and Norton is wondering what is going on as all the members of Fight Club begin to form some sort of underground army to challenge the establishment. Things grow frustrating while we keep trying to figure out what is going on. No one is acting right, not Marla, Bob, or anyone else. While not in the business of killing, these men plan to blow up several high-rise office-buildings while no one is in them. Norton tries to stop them. The final twist is a nice touch, but much of the movie is fighting and excess that could just as easily have been left out. We don't need to know that two men who are never fully developed lost their two front teeth in a brawl. The self-destructive feeling that not only is in the characters but gradually becomes the viewer is not what we want when we sit down and watch a movie about fictional characters in very personal situations.