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Fight Club Customer Reviews (109 - 111 of 146 Reviews)

The Men's Movement on Celluloid
In 1999, a decade into the bookish Men's Movement, its concerns have finally been committed to celluloid. "Fight Club's" Tyler Durden represents the cocky virile manhood missing in the pale fluorescence of modern man's office life in a service economy.

Brad Pitt's Tyler chainsmokes, wears red leather, dresses garishly, behaves transgressively, and begins a paramilitary movement to overthrow the glaze the American corporate world has placed in the eyes of its drone workers.

We begin, however, with Ed Norton's emasculated Jack, an insurance appraiser whose unchanneled emotion has made him a sag-eyed insomniac. Physically healthy, Jack discovers illness support groups as a means to vent his sadness and frustration. It's there that he meets sassy basketcase Marla Singer (Helena Bonhma Carter) whom he is too much of a eunuch to seduce. The first half is the film is sharp black humor as Jack and Marla begin their bizarre courtship.

Slowly Jack's macho alter ego Tyler begins eclipsing his gentle cooperative persona to the point where, under Tyler's influence, he burns his well-appointed IKEA-packed urban condo and moves to the seedy edge of town near a malodorous paper mill. Tyler and Jack, in buddy movie fashion, are first depicted as like-minded friends, both on the run from capitalistic values and their commodifying effect on human beings as well as a male-bashing Ritalin-crazed post-feminist world. In their large dilapidated shabby-chic home, they create a male precinct where the traditional masculine values of freedom, mischief, rebellion, and vitality can thrive.

In a touching scene, Tyler and Jack discuss the absence of fathers, hinting that this missing piece of their upbringing is behind their vague but tender homoeroticism. In their spare time, the duo form FIGHT CLUB, a group of disaffected men who meet in the basements of bars for bare knuckles boxing sessions which those involved find cathartic and invigorating.

In the Bible Christ says: "I came not to bring peace but a sword." Tyler Durden can be seen as a Christ figure. As a 30something, he's the right age. He gathers an enthused discipleship. He preaches of a spiritual war against materialism and docility. Instead of the Sermon on the Mount, we get The Sermon in the Basement. Tyler takes on the powers that be in his society, much as Christ did, with an army of misfits and outsiders, and he proves he is willing to die for his cause.

"Fight Club" flies in the face of political correctness every chance it gets and reminds us how sex and aggression animate our lives. The scene in which Tyler gives Jack a searing chemical burn on the back of his hand is the film's shuddering climax. Jack tries to disappear into New Age fantasy as Tyler urges him to stay with the pain. This is Jack's hazing into manhood, recalling the male rites of passage of primitive tribes. It reflects Christian mythos as well, since the scar from Jack's burn resembles one of Christ's stigmata. Jack and Tyler then proceed to give this scar to all new Fight Club members.

When Fight Club morphs into "Operation Mayhem," Tyler's vandalistic direct attack on civilization, Jack becomes skittish and winds up out of the information loop of an organization he helped to create. He and Tyler clash, which yields a shocking revelation about them I won't spoil here.

"Fight Club" and "American Beauty" (both 1999) rail against the domesticated demise of American frontier manhood. Their central characters are willing to pay a high price for freedom. These characters' failures and disconnections lead to a kind of endearing macho campiness, and many will be lead to sympathize with their "male malaise."

"Fight Club" is like a gun aimed at the idealized androgyny and co-ed conversion of the last 40 years. What men need, it seems to claim, is "guy-space" and "guy-time," male bonding and man-making ritual. The movie suggests that only after this confidence and swagger is achieved can a man be a fit companion for a woman, meeting her considerable sexual and emotional power with a brand of power all his own.

Well acted by Pitt, Norton, and Carter; ably directed with great technical flourish by David Fincher; poetically written by novelist Chuck Palahniuk and screenwriter Jim Uhls, "Fight Club" is a biting satire, a malcontented masterpiece that forecasts a redefinition of manhood which is somehow both revolutionary and reactionary. After Americans are past the long period of political centrism that began in the late 1980s and persists to
this day, look for "Fight Club" to be regarded as a crystal ball.

Destroy Like Nazi's
Fight Club is shocking, colorful, Matrix like, full of technical magic, but it stinks. The whole idea that Corporate America stifles freedom is bogus. Most folks put in 8 hours and go home to kiss the wife and kids, smoke pot, or ride their motorcycles. In truth, human activity after 5 in America is diverse. Wasted, gray lives, that's what its like in Socialist countries. So what do these fighting young men do to combat Corporate Fascism, they kill and destroy like Nazi's. Clear thinking there, hey! Yeah, Brad Pitt is believable as a handsome, cocky, cool guy. He had to use all his talent to stretch for that role. This movie is everything that's wrong with the Left Wing Intelligentsia on the East and Left Coast.

Mean-Spirited
I thought from the premise that this movie might be a sort of social commentary or offer some kind of existential insight into the modern human condition. Instead, I found it mean-spirited and confused.

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