Reviews - Fight Club (1999)

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Genres: Drama

Taglines: When you wake up in a different place at a different time, can you wake up as a different person?

Writers: Chuck Palahniuk, Jim Uhls

Stars: Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf, ...

A nameless first person narrator (Edward Norton) attends support groups in attempt to subdue his emotional state and relieve his insomniac state. When he meets Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), another fake attendee of support groups, his life seems to become a little more bearable. However when he associates himself with Tyler (Brad Pitt) he is dragged into an underground fight club and soap making scheme. Together the two men spiral out of control and engage in competitive rivalry for love and power. When the narrator is exposed to the hidden agenda of Tyler's fight club, he must accept the awful truth that Tyler may not be who he says he is.

100 | Bob Graham

Delivers a sucker punch to the audience and then pulls the rug out from under it. It is sensational. It is also grimly funny.

100

Fight Club -- cue the blurb machine -- is a knockout.

100 | Gemma Files

It always surprises, never bores. It's also just damn good, on every possible level -- so go see it. Now.

100 | Carrie Rickey

A knockout...So feverish is Fight Club...that thermometer contact might make mercury shatter.

91 | Paula Nechak

It assaults us with violence, brutality, sexual confusion and anarchy and has enough bruising, punishing humor to keep us laughing with relief.

90 | David Rooney

Bold, inventive, sustained adrenaline rush of a movie.

89 | Marc Savlov

Fight Club's dirty little secret is it's one of the best comedies of the decade.

88 | Wesley Morris

It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.

80 | Elvis Mitchell

The sardonic, testosterone-fueled science fiction of Fight Club touches a raw nerve.

80 | Robert Horton

Never less than dazzling to look at, and the scorching humor keeps it alive from scene to scene.

80 | Maitland McDonagh

A brilliantly realized series of sucker punches, a philosophical howl disguised as a muscular guy movie.

75 | Rene Rodriguez

As a piece of storytelling, Fight Club is a bit of a dud: It's a good 15 minutes too long, and the tension doesn't build the way you wish it would.

75 | Jay Carr

Begins with that invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz. But its chic indictment of empty materialist values fizzles.

75 | Lawrence Toppman

It's visually surrealistic, acted with integrity, so brutal in spots that I averted my eyes.

70 | Stephen Hunter

A provocative experience that lights you up even as it brutalizes you. And I don't even like Brad Pitt very much.

63 | Mike Clark

It's fun to talk about...but the price you pay is enduring its excesses and pummeled-home thematic points.

60 | Manohla Dargis

On a purely visual level, it's the most powerful and viscerally exciting movie to come out of Hollywood this year. Which doesn't mean that it's all good.

50 | Jonathan Rosenbaum

This exercise in mainstream masochism, macho posturing, and designer-grunge fascism is borderline ridiculous. But it also happens to be David Fincher's richest movie.

50 | Roger Ebert

But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get.

50 | Andrew O'Hehir

But imagination and energy are often not enough. On balance, this is the dumbest of the entries in Hollywood's anti-consumerist new wave.

50 | David Sterritt

Undermines its serious undertones with an avalanche of smirky cynicism designed to flatter the hipper-than-thou fantasies of adolescent moviegoers.

50 | J. Hoberman

This malevolently gleeful satire...is extremely funny, surprisingly well- acted, and boldly designed...at least until its steel-and-chrome soufflé falls apart.

50 | Jami Bernard

Grueling and bleak, but not unintelligent...although it's hardly groundbreaking just because everyone's face gets pulpy.

40 | Gregory Weinkauf

Fight Club is to intelligent men what Catherine Breillat's "Romance" is to intelligent women -- an insult.

40 | Tom Keogh

This much-anticipated but terribly underwhelming black comedy represents a seriously squandered opportunity.

30 | Kenneth Turan

What's most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it's saying something of significance.