A depressed and insomniac office worker had his life change after he encountered a man who is also fed up with his mundane life and they set up something than becomes a great deal.
It is working American Beauty-Susan Faludi territory, that illiberal, impious, inarticulate fringe that threatens the smug American center with an anger that cannot explain itself, can act out its frustrations only in inexplicable violence.
Wildly inventive, exceptionally cast and undeniably controversial, there's an endless list of subtexts and viewpoints which will fuel student pub debates for years.
Fight Club jettisons its sense of humour 60 minutes in, and, so far from satirising the tiresome "crisis of masculinity" stuff sloshing around the airwaves either side of the Atlantic, the film simply endorses it.
We're meant to take the male bonding and the blood rituals as a protest against the sterility of corporate life and modern design, but Fincher's sadomasochistic kicks overwhelm any possible social critique.
Movie Mezzanine
March 09, 2014
Fight Club may be iconic and technically proficient, but it's more distant than perhaps any film to attain "modern classic" status.
