Review of Fight Club (1999) by Alexanderg. — 06 Feb 2010

If you're too young for the MPAA rating, you'll probably think that watching sweaty men hurt one another is a good expression of masculinity and take this to be a deep and fascinating movie. If you're mature enough to realize that violence really isn't good for much of anything, you'll see right through the stupid "fighting sets you free from society" and spend two hours wondering why the characters would rather punch each other than do something useful with their time and energy.

The general theme of bringing down the office slave lifestyle could have made a great movie, but presenting a fascist underground fighting society as an acceptable alternative is just ludicrous. It's not an aweful movie; I loved the sequence where Tyler uses an unloaded revolver to motivate a convenience-store employee to improve his life, and the liposuction soap counterculture lifestyle was fascinating until it turned into a training complex for gullible and animistic men, but this movie does not deserve its high user score by any stretch.