My impromptu capsule review of Fight Club:

Fight Club takes two very potent (if not new) issues, The Dehumanizing Onslaught of Consumerism, and the Impotence of the Corporate Male, and presents them to us as if we were not smart enough to discern these cultural themes for ourselves. It’s as if the filmmakers just discovered these ideas for the first time and now need to give the rest of us "The Fight Club For Dummies." The core storyline is compelling: Edward Norton plays a male bureaucrat and self-improvement veteran who finds his redemption in the primal violence of a fight club. But the makers of Fight Club just can’t leave their great storyline alone. By the end of the movie, Norton is somehow all mixed up in a crazy scenario involving an underground, cultlike “fight club” movement that spreads to every American city. But despite the democratic grittiness of the fight club (“every man must fight” is the only rule), they all end up worshiping a supreme male (played by Brad Pitt). No meaningful female characters are dealt with or integrated into the psyche. "Self improvement is masturbation" might be one point the movie is trying to make, but the message I took from the film was the opposite, which is "self-improvement is the only option" versus the descent into insanity and fringe cults which seems the alternative. For me, the biggest fight scene did not take place on screen, it took place in my head, where I fought against the pressure to suspend my disbelief until I could hold out no longer. I didn’t want another apocalypctic urban legend, but I guess the filmmakers did. The simple tale of one man's descent into hell, only to find a bizarre redemption, without the rhetoric, would have been so much more compelling, and a much more devastating critique of self-improvement and the "sad, settled male life" than this chaotic film. There are enough interesting ideas and scenes here to power a number of good movies, but for this go around, they should have stuck with a story of how the twin evils of consumerism and sexual/emotional impotence manifested themselves into one strange and passionate (but not fantastic or fanciful) adventure. Blowing up buildings at the end seemed to play into exactly the evil that was being criticized, or to put in another way, is it really possible to create a Hollywood blockbuster that spits in the face of Hollywood blockbusters but in the end behaves exactly like a Hollywood blockbuster? Perhaps not.

JR