What's up with this movie?

Rating: 2/10 (6 August 2001)

I agree completely with the negative critics statements on the inside of the DVD. This movie's defenders have tried to pass it off as "cerebral" and "psychological" on this very page, and as a "profound portrait of how corporations ruin our lives." It is none of these. First of all, what makes people think it's cerebral? The endless whining? The laughable "we're all the middle children of history" attempts at philosophizing? The hardly novel idea that men need to have an outlet for their pent-up aggression? And the leftist idea (which has been out there since at least the time of Marx) that corporations have been destroying our lives and screwing us over? Praise the movie as cerebral, and you'd better be cerebral yourself to recognize it. Get yourself a book of Dostoyevsky or Kant and see how you handle real deep thought.
Second off, that it's psychological. Simple because the main character has a certain mental disorder (I won't be so bad to reveal what it is), is it psychological? After we see the character's illness in the movie, it seemed to me Norton fighting Pitt was like a bad Candid Camera joke. I was half-expecting the director to come on after the scene and say, "You took that scene seriously? Sucker!" It's amazing what this movie expects you to believe, particularly after the plot twist which, like the Usual Suspects (to which it has been often compared) is just too clever by a half, and voids entire sections of the movie.
I'm a fan of Ed Norton because I like his work. I also liked Seven quite a bit, so I can hardly be dismissed as a Fincher-hater. And I still agree that men in our society are fundamentally demasculinized in a way previous generations never had to deal with. But after seeing this movie, I think the solution may be worse than the cure.