# Fight Club (1999)

### reviewed by
Jon Popick

    PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com

David Fincher's (The Game) latest film begins at the end - in a high-rise office building where protagonist and narrator Jack (Edward Norton, American History X) is asked, with a pistol jammed into his mouth, if he has any last words. The gunman is Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt, Meet Joe Black), who explains to Jack that he has planted explosives in several nearby buildings with the intent of leveling several city blocks. We know this is the end of the film, and Jack's story is revealed through his nightmarish narrative flashback.

There is a reason we never learn Jack's name; he's supposed to represent an anonymous 30-year-old single white professional male - the kind that is slowly realizing that they have no purpose in life, other than toiling away in a white-button-down-shirt job all day and watching sitcoms from the comfort of their IKEA couch at night. They are the middle generation – raised by women and without either a Great War or a Great Depression. Their great depression is existence.

Once Jack takes us to the beginning of his tale, we learn that he works for a major automobile manufacturer, investigating accidents caused by faulty design to determine whether a recall would be cost effective for the company. He also suffers from insomnia, a condition that his doctor refuses to cure via prescription medication. The doctor suggests depressed Jack get more exercise and tells him to cheer up, implying that he check out a support group at St. Christopher's Church to see the real misery of the human condition.

The support group is for men that have been gelded due to testicular cancer. Jack is paired up with Robert Paulsen (Meat Loaf, Black Dog) a giant man with giant `bitch-tits' as a result of female hormone treatments. After a weepy Robert pours his heart out to him, Jack gets the best night of sleep he's had in months. As a result, Jack becomes somewhat of a support-group junkie, attending meetings for victims of tuberculosis, sickle-cell anemia and melanoma, among other afflictions.

After a year of touring the anguish and sorrow circuit, Jack meets two people that will change his life forever. One is Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter, Theory of Flight), a suicidal woman he notices at all of the support group meetings. The second is Tyler, a soap salesman with extensive knowledge in explosives that Jack meets on an airplane. Because of a fire in his condo, Jack takes up residence with Tyler, who lives in an immense dilapidated house in an abandoned part of the city.

As Jack and Tyler bond, they discover that pummeling each other is a great therapeutic way to unload all of the pressure of being young white men. They regularly hold fistfights each Saturday outside a dive bar called Lou's Tavern and soon are joined by other disillusioned young white men. Eventually, the `Fight Club' moves into the dirt-floored basement of Lou's Tavern and is subjected to several rules (you probably already know the first one).

While Jack is thrilled at the idea of Fight Club and all it represents, he suspects Tyler of deviant ulterior motives. Just who is Tyler Durden and why do all of these complete strangers seem to become his disciples so quickly? How did he manage to score Marla as a sex partner? Jack also learns that Fight Club is open on nights other than Saturday and has heard rumors that Durden has opened branches in other cities, as well.

As their relationship fizzles, so does Jack's remaining semblance of a life. He comes to work disheveled, bloodied and without a tie. He fantasizes about Marla and he grows increasingly suspicious of Tyler's nihilistic and mysterious goals of `freeing' men from the drudgery of their lives.

Fight Club is one heck of a brutally graphic film. Visually, it's amazing, with Fincher pulling no punches in creating the gritty underworld of indifferent men. The story is based on Chuck Palahniuk's novel, who allegedly wrote it long-hand while working as a truck mechanic. Palahniuk's story will leave some people slack-jawed, some nauseous, some cold and some afraid to walk through the theater parking lot to get to their cars. Thanks to Fincher's direction (as well as his production team – editor Jim Haygood and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth from The Game) you can almost feel every punch thrown in the film.

Although there are plenty of fantastic scenes in the film, two in particular have the misfortune of following recent pictures with similar content - American Beauty and The Sixth Sense. I won't say what the similarities are, but after you see Fight Club, it will be pretty obvious. Despite this bad luck, Fight Club is still a fantastic flick and almost seems ahead of its time in terms of social message and violent content.

2:19 – R for disturbing and graphic depiction of violent anti-social behavior, sexuality and language

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews