By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to director David Fincher’s 1999 Chuck Palahniuk adaptation Fight Club starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Jared Leto and Helena Bonham Carter.
Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: director David Fincher takes a painfully pretentious novel by an equally pretentious author and turns it into an even more pretentious feature film.
The second rule of Fight Club is: he includes lots of scenes of hot, shirtless guys with ripped-to-shit abs beating the bejesus out of each other in order to appeal to the latent homosexuality of the hordes of late-teen-early-twenties young men who form the film’s target audience.
Third rule of Fight Club: Fincher gets a budget of over seventy million dollars, is backed by a major Hollywood studio, and casts bigshot Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Jared Leto, while at the same time pissing and moaning about things like rampant capitalism and – God help us! – IKEA.
Fourth rule of Fight Club: Fincher taps Helena Bonham Carter, one of the most irritating actresses in the history of movies, to play a character who is the cinematic equivalent of listening to someone scrape their fingernails down a blackboard for over two hours.
Fifth rule of Fight Club: the script will be filled with preposterous, self consciously hip, “instantly quotable” dialogue (a few choice examples: “The things you own end up owning you”; “Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?”; “Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken”) that will forever be spouted by young guys who hang out in comic book stores and spend a lot of time wanki…sorry, blogging.
Sixth rule of Fight Club: the film will be accompanied by a goadingly “clever” and “self-reflexive” advertising campaign dreamed up by the kind of “guys in suits” that the movie is allegedly satirising.
Seventh rule of Fight Club: the film will come on like it wants to be a bold piece of revolutionary rhetoric but will ultimately turn out to be the limp, far less threatening ramblings of a madman with multiple personality disorder.
And the eighth and final rule: Fight Club totally, completely and utterly sucks.
