what a movie

Rating: 9/10 (7 July 2015)

listering, hallucinatory, often brilliant, the film by David Fincher is a combination punch of social satire and sociopathology. Fight Club may be iconic and technically proficient, but it's more distant than perhaps any film to attain "modern classic" status. The trajectory of Fight Club is baffling. In its first hour or so, this picture appears to be a gloriously spiteful and well-acted satire of our bogus contemporary "crisis of masculinity": self- pitying guys hugging in groups and claiming victim status - modern consumer society having allegedly rendered the poor dears' hunter- gathering instincts obsolete. But, by the end, it has unravelled catastrophically into a strident, shallow, pretentious bore with a "twist" ending that doesn't work. And it is a film which smugly flirts, oh-so-very- controversially, with some of the intellectual and cultural paraphernalia of fascism - but does not have anything like the nerve, still less the cerebral equipment, to back this pose up.
Edward Norton gives a compulsively twitchy, nerdy, hollow-eyed performance as Fight Club's Narrator: a 30-year-old single guy with a white collar job in the automotive industry and a secret addiction; he loves attending support groups posing as a sufferer. Hilariously, this is the only thing that gives him an emotional high.