All the Right Ingredients, but Recipe Is Lacking

Rating: 6/10 (5 January 2003)

Fight Club starts out as a cinematic lava lamp--the kind of thing that's most entertaining when you perception of reality is impaired. The second half is more in-line with stylized Hollywood outings. Unfortunately, the two halves aren't very compatible, and it's likely you'll end up wishing it favored one over the other.
We start out following a man (Edward Norton) as he bounces between support groups for problems he doesn't have in an attempt to release his pent-up hostility and pain. He eventually meets a woman with the same idea, and the two agree to evenly divide the support groups between them. She turns out to be in dire need of help, just not the kind she can get from a roomful of testicular cancer survivors. Norton, however, wants nothing to do with her.
Then Norton meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a bizarre cross between a rock star and a pimp, whose line of traveling soap salesman seems oddly reminiscent of John Candy's character in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles." When Norton's apartment mysteriously explodes, he borrows a page from "Midnight Cowboy" and shacks up with Tyler. But Tyler has powerful ideas and a powerful personality. It isn't long before Norton's life gets intense. When Tyler isn't sleeping with Marla, he's running an underground boxing club or devising ways to free his brethren from corporate America. His following grows thanks to his uncanny ability to convince the average man that blind devotion offers the greatest reward. All this leads to a confrontation that's equally derivative and deceptive.
The problem is, Fight Club doesn't merely lead us to believe things that aren't true; it deliberately lies to us. Successful movies in this genre coerce us into filling in the blanks with our minds only to discover there were no blanks to fill in to begin with. Fight Club, on the other hand, shows us one thing, then tells us something else, leaving us with more questions than answers (plot questions, not philosophical ones). That's unfair and disappointing. It's the sign of a movie that would have been great if the direction had been more cohesive. Instead, we're left with "just another wacky Brad Pitt movie."