Sorry, it bored me to tears. And then made me mad with bad storytelling.

Rating: 5/10 (16 September 2008)

Beyond anything I'm about to say, I just don't understand how people can call Fight Club entertaining. I was so bored I had to give myself excuses to turn it off and do something else. It just kept going and going, and 90% of the screen time has nothing to do with anything. The humor was so juvenile and cliché, I can't say I laughed onceI heard the entire script back in 3rd grade at recess. So, really, as far as entertainment value goes, I can't see anything redeeming. Every 10 minutes I kept asking myself why I was even watching it, because nothing was happening, and in the end nothing did happen. There was no story, just some pretentious social commentary that was nothing new.
Being a man, I've heard the cliché "We're men raised by women!" so many times I can't even take it seriously anymore. That cliché has existed since then 60's, as far as my knowledge, if not earlier than that. Now this takes that cliché and forms a movie around it. For one, everyone who is calling this "daring" or "original" needs to understand something: it takes no more balls the take a cliché and build a movie around it than it does to remake something.
The intellectuals on there had argued both ways about the validity of "We're men raised by women!", so I'm not going to. Go read their reviews and find your open opinion on the matter. However, something no one here has said is that Fight Club is exactly that: an opinion. I could make a movie about a group of men who realize that they prefer being like women, then backlash and say EVERY man HAS to feel this way. Why? Because . . . well, because the fictional characters in the movie said so. That's because! Fight Club is an opinion, not an absolute truth. If you were to take real men and put them in a fight club such as this one, I can guarantee a lot of them would NOT feel alivebut the film is too immature to admit that it a possibility. Likewise, if you were to start a fight club for women, I can guarantee that a lot of them would feel just as alive as menonce again, the film doesn't admit that is a possibility. Fight Club is so self-absorbed in a shallow cliché that it denies all flaws it could have, and that is the main flaw with the social commentary. If Fight Club was truly ballsy and original itself, which it's not, the story would at least admit that it is an opinion and not absolute truth, as it claims. And, really, the fact alone that people would base their full opinions on something fictional is ridicules and shallow in itself. Fiction is fiction. Yes, fiction can be a tool to understanding reality, but it still can be manipulated to understand whatever reality it wants to understandincluding false reality. Basing an entire view on something based on something fictional, as this movie is, is just pathetic.
Okay, now with that out of the way, I want to talk about the horrid storytelling this movie had. If Fight Club actually knew how to tell a story, I might have given it a much higher score. The entire movie is insanely boring, but the first hour and a half is pretty well-done, if you ignore the fact you've heard every bit of humor on the playground and that David Fincher has laughably poor arguing skills. After the car crash scene, however, the entire movie descends into poorly directed chaos. There are so many bloated, pointless scenes from this point until the end I was literally counting down the minutes until it was over. All the quirks that made the characters interesting fall away and leave them cardboard-thin. If the storytelling was done effectively, the chaos would have led into an intense, direct climax/finale. Instead, the ending is bloated with sub-plot after sub-plot that amount to nothing in the end, getting rid of any and all intensity that could have been created, and just leaving me bored and laughing at things that weren't supposed to be funny. The decent fight club plot twists into a cheesy wannabe Die Hard plot and at that point I lost all ability to take the movie seriously. I can understand it was trying to add another layer to the overdone social commentary, but it didn't work. The ending should have been cut by at least 40 minutes to be even close to effective. Poor, cheesy storytelling.
In the end, I can understand why people would think this movie is brilliant. On the other hand, I can't understand anyone out of junior high who shouldn't see the gaping flaws in the social commentary. But maybe I'm looking at this entire review the wrong way. Maybe I'm trying to find flaws with the story, when it had no story to start with. This just a poor excuse to preach clichés you've heard all your life, not to entertain. It's an English opinion paper, nothing more, nothing less. If so, it gets an F for being pretensions, close-minded, and just downright boring.
5/10