Lame

Rating: 3/10 (23 July 2000)

I can't believe this shaggy dog of a movie now rests at number #30 on the best movies ever list. Fight Club is so lame that it's not funny.
*spoilers*
So, the Brad Pitt character doesn't exist. He's just what the Ed Norton character wishes he could be. This means that all them scenes with Norton fighting with Brad Pitt was actually just Norton physically fighting with himself! Huh? And they want us to believe that the fight club began with other guys interested in joining one guy who keeps fighting with himself? If I see a guy fighting with himself, I won't try to join in but run. Run away as fast as possible.
The whole basis of the "story" is so lame, it's not to be believed. It's equivalent to an entire episode of Star Trek taking place in the freaking Holodeck. It's like an entire season of Dallas brushed off because Bobby's death was all but a dream.
There's no emotional pay-off to all the insanity going on screen. And because of this, the whole idea of Norton's dementia, something that could have been emotionally overwhelming, simply becomes tired and cheap. David Fincher's direction is to blame here. He uses layers and layers of cinematic techniques which belie the whole resolution of the story: Norton talking directly to the screen; Norton's annoying voice-over (oh, please stop talking!); the movie begins when the story ends and by the end of the film we are then guided back by Norton to where exactly the "real" story began (which is bunk because at the end, Norton is acutely aware that the Tyler is a figment of his imagination and yet throughout the film his voice-over gives no hint that Tyler is not real); tons o' red herrings in the storyline that are there just to hide the fact that there's no story here, folks. Loads of techniques usually reserved for more whimsical stuff simply don't belong here. And add to this pot-pourri of directors' tricks a gazillion gratuitously flashy scenes just to distract the (MTV) jaded audience long enough here and there for nanoseconds and you basically have what Fight Club is: lame.
Fincher's direction is set on overkill. Fight Club is an extremely overdirected movie. For instance, the opening credits. Now why the use of crappy, flashy CGI effects when a standard opening credit would have been sufficient? No reason but to be (very) showy. Fight Club is overdirected, overwritten, overacted, overly clever for its own good, over EVERYTHING, with a lame, nonexistent story at its center!