OK guess what? Yup its time for another review on this blog which is well over 100 posts now, so I'm quite impressed with my prolific level (although perhaps not the overall quality maybe??) so far. So enough of all that time to look at my next review which is David Fincher's dark comedy, Fight Club, starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, so let's go....
Right so the story is set around a nameless insomniac (Norton, although for the purposes of the plot I will call him Jack as he refers to some magazine articles about a man named Jack during the film) who is a travelling employee for an automobile company. After six months of insomnia, Jack decides on the advice of a doctor to try and go along and see a support group for testicular cancer to see what real pain is. Jack goes along and pretends that he too is a sufferer and it ends up giving him the emotional release he needs to relieve his insomnia and he shares a bond with one of the group's members, a former bodybuilder with large man boobs (or bitch tits as Jack puts it!), Bob (Meat Loaf). However after attending so many different support groups for other diseases, Jack soon encounter a woman, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) who is trying the same for unknown reasons (well acutally she claims it cheaper than a movie and there is free coffee!). However Jack realising that Marla too is lying it means he can no longer feel the same release as before so his insomnia returns. Jack however on confronting Marla eventually agrees to split the classes between them so they won't end up being at the same group together.
After this Jack meets a travelling salesman named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) a rather mysterious and enigmatic character, on a plane flight. Jack however on returning to his apartment arrives to find it has been destroyed in a explosion, leaving Jack no choice but to contact Tyler (who gave him his business card). Jack meets up with Tyler at a bar and afterwards Tyler asks Jack to hit him as hard as he can, which Jack reluctantly does, which soon ends up in a fistfight, and he ends up staying with Tyler at an old dilapidated house. Later on Jack and Tyler engage in more fights outside the bar, which soon attracts the attention of other men who soon get involved in the fights aswell. After this Tyler and Jack set up their own fight club in the basement of the bar (Moe's tavern) where Tyler sets down the rules to the members. As time passes fight club grows as more members join. Later on Marla calls Jack and tells him she took an overdose, but he hangs up the phone and leaves, but Tyler picks up the receiver and goes to save her, by having sex with her in order to keep her awake "all night" (as Marla puts it!).
The next day Jack is shocked to find Marla in the kitchen and asks what she is doing there, and Marla storms out confused and angry. Tyler then tells Jack that he can't talk to Marla about him or fight club and if he does, then they're done. As fight club grows it moves out of the basement and Tyler develops a new project called "Project Mayhem" in which the members committ acts of vandalism against corporate and materialist culture. Jack however starts to grow discontent with Tyler as he wants become a larger part in Project mayhem as he feels sidelined by Tyler. Tyler soon however disappears and Jack wakes up to find that he has gone from the house, only to find that it has now been occupied by members of Project Mayhem. At this point some of the members of the group carry one of the members in, Bob who was shot dead by the police after an attempt to vandalise a coffee store. Jack is appalled by the project and Bob's death and flees the house to try and track down Tyler, which takes him on a journey which will reveal a surprise that he never would expect...
Based on the book of the same written by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club is a darkly entertaining film, which on one hand can be seen as a message against corporate greed and modern materialism, and on the other it can be seen as one man's descent into madness. The film itself revels in its dark humour and Fight Club itself is
very much an exclusive club for men only, and Tyler makes it clear in
the club's eight rules, specifically in the second that "you do NOT talk
about Fight Club!". The narrator (or Jack) is the everyman who struggles with the mundanity of his own life and in meeting Tyler he finds an answer to this, although it soon leads him on a dark chaotic path. Tyler on the other hand is the charismatic, handsome and muscular figure and an image that Jack would like to see of himself. And fight club itself becomes the expression of every man's rage against society and shallowness of the modern life, which starts out as a group of men fighting every week, as Jack puts it "every weekend, we were finding something out". But as the film moves onto Project Mayhem by this time Fight Club is no longer about "finding something out" it becomes more about spitting out at reality itself, and that point Jack and Tyler's partnership starts to fall apart, as clearly they both want different things.
Getting onto the performances they are pretty much top drawer, as the two leads are both great in their roles. Starting with Edward Norton as the insomnical narrator, who is great in his role and he plays him with an almost droning monotone at times. Norton's narration does indeed drive the film, and he has his fair shair of good dialogue, such as when he reads from the medical magazines he finds in Tyler's abandoned house and he reads "I am Jack's medulla oblungata" and "I am Jill's nipples". And he refers to the third person style of Jack, in some of his other scenes with lines such as "I am Jack's smirking revenge" and "I am Jack's complete lack of surprise" and "I am Jack's raging bile duct!". One of my favourite lines though is when he and Tyler sell soap in a store, which they made up from fat taken from a liopsuction clinic, and Jack says "we were selling women their own fat asses back to them. It was beautfiul". Also one of Ed's funniest lines in the film is when Marla first invades the testicular cancer group and he says angrily in his narration "this chick, Marla Singer did not have testicular cancer!". Also later on when he tries to convince some cops at a police station, who are also members of fight club, to abort one of Tyler's missions, they keep saying "he said you would say that!". And in the subsquent scene Jack runs for his life as he narrates "I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I run some more!". Another funny moment is where Jack and Tyler walk on the streets and he says which celebrity he would fight "Shatner. I'd fight William Shatner!". And lastly I will mention the scene where Jack first meets Bob and he narrates that "Bob, had bitch tits, in the way you would think as God's as big!"
Brad Pitt here also delivers one of his best performances as the enigmatic Tyler Durden, who is the polar opposite of Jack in every way, in terms of his looks, physique, intelligence and ambition. Brad clearly must have been revelling in this role as he delivers so many of his lines in such as charismatic and commanding form. Brad has quite a few memorable ones, and one that comes to mind is when he addresses the camera and says "you are not your job, you are not how much money you have in the bank, you are not your fucking car keys. We are the all singing all dancing crap of the world!". One of Brad's best scenes in fact comes when he expresses his disappointment over how the members of Fight Club have been breaking the first two rules of the club and he gives a speech about modern life, and he says "we are the middle children of history, with no war, no great depression. Our war is a spirital war, our great depression is our lives". Brad also has some funny moments when he rides a bike around the dilapidated house as Jack reads out the medical magazine articles and he trips and falls off the bike. Later on Brad also has a funny scene when he has Bob stand outside their house for three days, and he refuses to let him in by saying "you're too old fat man, and you're tits are too big, get the fuck off my porch!".
Helena Bonham Carter is also really good in her role as the masochistic Marla Singer, who thrives off living life dangerously. Helena also get's some of the film's best lines, especially in her first scene with Ed when he confronts Marla over being an imposter in the support groups, and he says to her she can't attend the testicular cancer group and she says "well technically I have more right to be there than you, as you still have your balls!". The wild noises of her shagging with Tyler are also really funny, as the scene in the film where she climaxes loudly as Jack wearily arrives back home from work. This scene later prompts a line where she meets with Jack in a diner and she says to him "there are things I like about you, you're smart, you're funny, and your spectacular in bed!". I also like the scene where Marla argues with Jack after a night off lurvemaking with Tyler and she says to him "you are such a nut case I can't even keep up!" and she sings "gotta get off, gotta get off this merry-go-round!". Helena also was given a line which the 20th century fox studio execs balked at the notion of keeping in, but in the end it was kept as Marla says after her first sex session with Tyler "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school!".
Of the other supporting performances, Meat Loaf provides an amusing and rather poignant performance as the bloated Bob, a former bodybuilder, who now has testicular cancer, and finds out about Fight Club. Meat has quite a funny moment when he meets up with Jack again on the street as he is eating a box of doughnuts, he chucks one away as he greets him with a bear hug. Also during Jack and Bob's fight at fight club, Bob nearly crushes Jack to death in a bear hug, and afterwards he asks Jack "I didn't hurt did I?" and Jack says "yeah actually you did!". Jared Leto also provides a small but striking cameo as one of the good looking members of Fight Club whom out of jealousy one night, Jack beats to a pulp, as he "felt like destroying something beautiful" and we later see with his face left disfigured.
Direction wise, David Fincher does a great job technically speaking and he gives the film a pale green tint (which was done by the film been given a bleach bypass, a technique which was also used in The Matrix (I think!). He also makes good use of the occassonal flash up blips of Tyler Durden early on the film before he makes his proper appearance, as well as the winding camera work in the film's title sequence (which is basically a CGI impression of the inside of Jack's throat as the camera moves out to show that Tyler has a gun in his mouth). Although the film's violence is strong, it never glorifies violence, and if anything it does the opposite, as the men fight in a dirty and grimy basement. Also worthy of mention is the Dust Brothers quirky score, which is a mixture of techno, funk and samples, and there some really good stand out tracks in the film, one of the best being the title theme.
As for the film's flaws were there are one or two, the main for me is that at times the film threatens to choke itself on its own cleverness, and the dialogue as witty as it is, is also quite annoying at times, as if it is almost self-congratulatory. I also have a problem with Tyler's character (which is not a slight on Brad's excellent performance) as he is basically an arrogant pretentious arse, who spends most of his time spouting out his anti-establishment philosophy such as "we are God's unwanted children, so be it!" and "listen up maggots, you are not a unique or beautiful snow flake, you are the same decaying organic matter as everything else". And by the time that Jack "separates" himself from Tyler, you feel almost glad when he is gone in that respect. And getting on to what is essentially a PLOT SPOILER, I also think the timeline between Jack acting as Tyler, and being himself becomes quite blurred especially as one of the members of fight club says that "Mr Durden sleeps only one hour an night". This is especially noticed in the scene where just find out that Tyler and Jack are both the same person, and Jack falls unconscious as Tyler takes over, but as Jack comes to he finds that he has been checked out of a hotel, does that mean he went downstairs, checked out and went back upstairs to sleep! Also when he wakes up after their car crash in the house, and finds that Tyler has gone and that Tyler has apparently set up Fight Clubs all over the country, if Jack is indeed Tyler, then how long was Tyler supposedly away for??? And that being the case did he do all that and come back, have a nap at the house and then be Jack again! At this point Jack becomes an even more insignificant figure, and as the film nears its end its all about a battle for control. Also the timeline logic of Marla meeting with Jack is also a bit hazy, as he gives her his telephone number to swap nights for the support groups, and she ends up phoning him at Tyler's house, which means he must have given her the number of Tyler's house, yet at that point he hadn't even met Tyler yet! So overall you could say one of the main flaws is indeed the chronology of the film's events are a bit out of sync.
But despite that Fight Club is a very entertaining black comedy, which might not be to everyone's taste, but if you are a fan of David Fincher then you are sure not to be disappointed.
And with that I shall leave it there.
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