Fight Club

November 1999

This latest offering from the director of Seven is a good try, but somehow it never quite gets there. During a gruelling two and a quarter hour cinema session, this tale of millenium angst has Ed Norton and Brad Pitt grappling with life, desire and each other in an attempt to escape the consumerist mundanity of mail-order furniture, condo living and mobile phones.
The anonymous narrator, played by Ed Norton, is an insomniac living a humdrum but materially comfortable life as an accident-calculator for a car firm. When his doctor advises him to go see some real suffering, in the form of a testicular cancer support group, he becomes addicted, and finds comfort amongst the terminally-ill, in particular between the expansive breasts of hormonal Bob, played by an equally expansive Meatloaf. Unfortunately, the remedial effects of the groups are interrupted by another disease junkie (Helena Bonham Carter). You may ask what all this has to do with fights, or Brad Pitt, or anything. Nothing really, other than to introduce Helena as the rather tenuous, if sexually athletic, ‘love’ interest, and to provide a darkly humourous interlude (albeit very sick) that is probably the most entertaining in the film.
Anyway, enter Tyler (yes, that’s Brad), as the sinister yet beguiling badboy in a tight t-shirt, who lures the narrator into his dark world in true doppelganger tradition. Spurting philosophical prognostications such as ‘Our great war is a spiritual war, our depression is our lives’ he is, unfortunately, irrepressibly boring, and manages only to sound like a teenager with attitude. Tyler persuades his new-found friend to join his campaign to destroy the blasé world around them by, among other things, recycling the cellulite of rich women extracted during liposuction, inserting pornographic frames into Walt Disney cartoons, redesigning airplane emergency advice and, yes, creating Fight Clubs, where men can relocate their masculinity by beating each other to a pulp.
The fault of this film is that it can’t decide whether it wants to be a typically gory, muscle-bound action movie or a philosophical and psychological debate about the nature of self and self-delusion. Both could work, but the mixture left me unsatisfied on both accounts. The disturbed nature of all the main characters is so complex that it requires further development to make us appreciate their condition. Meanwhile we are fed a story of an underground Fight Club that, again, is not fully developed. Although Fight Club, and the Project Mayhem that follows, is a direct product of the twisted fascism of Tyler, neither tie up properly within the greater scale of the plot.
The result? A meaningless mish-mash of pretentious pseudo-philosophy and gratuitous gore. Fight Club had me fidgeting in my seat, not from the sight of Brad Pitt’s six-pack, but from indescribable boredom.

Jane Labous