Graphically stylish, aestheticizes violent anti-social behavior

Rating: 3/10 (30 October 1999)

"Fight Club" is a graphically stylish movie that vainly claims itself to being a thoughtful film, but whose effect in the end, is to aestheticize and condone the ideas it purports to examine. It is simply a violent, anti-social, and misogynist film hiding behind a veil of being a kind of psycho/social critique or expose on the masculine entity and the effect on it by North American values.
I personally have no problem in the case of a truly artful and intelligent film making an argument for polemical statement and extremism; this is definitely not the case here. Content-wise, it is undeftly handled material; I think because the filmmaker was so utterly concerned with the making of certain visual moments and lost grip of the whole. I fear for all the angry young males in our society that may see this film and become inspired to re-enact the imagery.
"Fight Club" reminds me of a film that may have began as an interesting and compelling idea, but then in the course of its making, gets "Hollywooded". It has several fine visual moments that are in turn subverted by equally horrible ones. It insults the viewer over and over; by employing pedantic, heavy-handed and contradictory motifs such as the highly militaristic yet zombie-esque 'army' to propagate "mayhem"; by so glibly setting up what ultimately turns out to be a literal interpretation of multiple personality disorder (I suppose juxtaposing incongruous elements was the means).
Too much visuals technology, probably too much budget and attention on the bottom line, not enough attention on structure and content, while pretending to be an ideas film, makes this an insulting and perhaps even, a dangerous movie. I wouldn't want to be working in a building who principal tenant is a credit card company for the next while.