If you can't figure out the mystery before it's revealed, you might think it's a good movie

Rating: 6/10 (9 September 2007)

Christian Bale stars as an insomniac factory worker who begins to lose his sanity. This is the kind of movie that has a mysterious character, unknown and unseen by all except the protagonist, pop up. We know pretty much instantly that this mystery person doesn't exist, and, given the hundred other movies of the last decade where it has happened, we assume that it's a manifestation of the protagonist's psyche. In The Machinist, it's particularly easy to guess it all, because we're told from the outset that Bale hasn't slept for a whole year. We know he's probably hallucinating, so we know that everything we see him experience is possibly not real. This is also the kind of film where images and actions are repeated, so we can figure that these things are involved in some kind of major event that happened before the story started (perhaps the time Bale stopped sleeping, eh?). If we can stick it out to the end, we'll know the whole story. Brad Anderson's direction is pretty good, I'll admit, but we've seen The Machinist a hundred times since the beginning of this decade. If you've seen films like Memento, Mulholland Dr., Takashi Miike's Box, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, Stay, or The Secret Window, you've already seen The Machinist.