Fight Club Reviews
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.
Blistering, hallucinatory, often brilliant, the film by David Fincher is a combination punch of social satire and sociopathology.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Fight Club is an arresting, eventually appalling excursion into social satire by way of punishing violence.
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.
This is American self-absorption at its finest.
[A] bold, inventive, sustained adrenaline rush of a movie...
Time Out
Top CriticYou can call [it] irresponsible. Or you can call it the only essential Hollywood film of 1999.
If it had all continued in the vein explored in the first act, it might have become a great film. But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Delivers a sucker punch to the audience and then pulls the rug out from under it. It is sensational.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Globe and Mail
Top Critic| Original Score: 3/4
If you want a movie that makes sense and doesn't make you chuckle at its sophomoric satire, laugh this one right off your list.
Fight Club is an empty shout of 'To hell with it all!'
A bloody, hilarious ride into the twisted recesses of the modern male psyche.
Extremely funny, surprisingly well-acted, and boldly designed -- at least until its steel-and-chrome soufflé falls apart.
An original piece of filmmaking!
Fight Club rolls out its indictments and its Zen koans, but what it really resembles, perhaps unknowingly, is the squall of a whiny and essentially white-male generation that feels ruined by the privileges of women and a booming economy.
If the first rule of Fight Club is 'Nobody talks about Fight Club,' a fitting subsection might be 'Why would anyone want to?'
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
Bloody mess of a guy film loses its battle to have any real meaning.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Certainly no movie in years has had this much subversive fun.
If, as Fincher has said, this movie is supposed to be funny, then the joke's on us.
Full Review
| Original Score: D
Along with the superior technical work, the movie shows off its three leads at their best.
Pitt's best work since A River Runs Through It.
Fight Club is a distinctively dense and often hilarious film, but in the end it's nonsense.
A fabulously berserk runaway train of a movie, David Fincher's Fight Club is post-MTV filmmaking at its most assured and courageous.
Affliction is a better film, because it brings us into the hearts and minds of its characters rather than just bludgeoning us with its visions.
It's about being young, male and powerless against the pacifying drug of consumerism. It's about solitude, despair and bottled-up rage... It's about daring to imagine the disenfranchised reducing the world to rubble and starting over.
The Fight Club is a memorable and superior motion picture - a rare movie that does not abandon insight in its quest to jolt the viewer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
A wickedly funny assault on the soul-destroying nature of 20th-century consumerism
The director of Seven and The Game for the first time finds subject matter audacious enough to suit his lightning-fast visual sophistication, and puts that style to stunningly effective use.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
