Stupefying beyond belief; Fight Club is a messy spectacle of ugliness, exposition and crass ideologies playing out under a broad banner of mainstream entertainment.

Rating: 4/10 (7 May 2010)

I read that Fight Club is a "man's film", whatever that means. Truth be told, it's a little boy's film, a messy; scrappy; clawing; pseudo-philosophical piece of turgid nonsense lapped up by people who see a music video aesthetic crossed with their favourite actors churned out of this contemporary Hollywood star system we have that just happens to dabble in some meek philosophy: bums and nobodies like the ones in the film will find its gimmicky pretences enthralling, appealing and quite interesting. For the rest of us, this is lecturing nonsense from a writer whom ought to have all his pens, pencils and word processors taken away from him. The film's entire thesis is captured in a sequence in which, at the fight club of the title, the store owner comes down into his own shop's basement to question what everyone's doing. After some grief from Durden, he beats him before eventually being subdued himself by a blood soaked Durden slobbering all over him. The owner runs off; suddenly attuned to allowing the club to remain and all he needed to arrive at this point is a good fight of some description. That's it; that's all you need to know right there – the rest is nonsense of the highest order.
The film plays out under this facade of post-modern trickery and modern movie making gimmicks, thus rendering it "accessible"; but the fact we're expected to swallow this infantile babble about how difficult it is to be a blank, bummed out nobody; a thug, a vandal, whose lives are in the dank state they are because they never found any particular field in which they could excel, is pathetic. The film was David Fincher's fourth, but he will not churn out a worser piece of cinematic drek in his life than the adolescent, preening nonsense that is Fight Club. The piece is essentially one long flashback and is narrated by Edward Norton's nameless character. When we first see him, he has a gun in his mouth and finds himself in an area chock full of explosives courtesy of Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden. Norton initially I.D's himself as a slave to consumerism; an unexciting office worker who comes to find solace in fighting and violence with other men in an organised fight ring from whence the title derives.
But in Durden, a frightening character is created: a thug, a vandal, a terrorist but a role model; an individual whose manic hair style; cool looking shades; extravagant dress sense; sexual habits and natural charisma paints positive characteristics in an individual that ought to be anything but. Durden sees himself as a saviour; a liberator; an army general whom leads his troops and encourages them to break the shackles of life; someone whom frees and liberates via terror, as exemplified in a scene set in a convenience store car park in which he threatens to execute a young store worker if he doesn't return to education. All this leads to a sickening finale, an end that carries a highly romanticised, emotionally heavy sensibility about it as bombs go off and two people embrace.
The film is from the pen of Jim Uhls by way of Chuck Palahniuk's novel, the film is Palahniuk's inane babbling against the machine; his banal, inane ranting and raving of which the arguments in the film are put across by way of nothing more than childish expositional tidbits on behalf of Pitt's character: "The things you own end up owning you" is a sample. In stark comparison to Norton's grey suit; blank shirt-clad and office booth based character, the one he shares most screen time with, Durden is a dangerously vibrant explosion of colour and energy. Later, there's a reason for all this hopping about in characteristics and mannerism as well as the restrictions in the Norton-Pitt interaction; but in itself, opens up a number of problems as to how they can be in separate places at once and how on Earth one person can know about one item (such as the whereabouts of the human fat) with the other seemingly oblivious to all links to it.
Make no mistake, the film is the clawing ramblings of someone with some serious issues. In attempting to wage a war on consumerism, we get plenty in the way of product placement for companies such as Pepsi and Apple Macintosh; its approach sees a world initially filtered through the psyche of an insomniac in Norton's character, before support groups and false emotion helps cure that and a character named Marla (Carter) push it back to the forefront again. Is there a need for her character? Marla's presence opens up a sub-plot to do with her own problems of suicidal ideation and a fling she has with Durden which is entirely pointless. After a while, the film realises her presence is futile; that the piece is meant to be about the relationship of its two lead men, their masculinity and their relationship with other men, scrapping her for more inane tangents that run off on separate strands.
The whole thing is as empty headed and crass as it sounds, this underground fight ring escalating from a celebration of pain, violence and all things grimy and nasty into a tale of a terrorist group full of 'misunderstood' philistine-infused males. In creating an ugly film about ugly people with ugly views, but filtering it by way of sporadic philosophy and sociology with an accessible aesthetic in its MTV-style appearance, Fincher has crafted a text he's most certainly above. It's nonsense of the worst kind; the sort of nonsense that has an eye on being labelled as something higher than first appears, addressing people in society doing what's deemed menial jobs before actually becoming someone in the ring during which battering and bruising someone else is the answer to life's problems. It's babble; babble of the most patronising and disorganised, sporadic order; a maddening and dulling faux-intellectual piece of nonsense.