Fight Club

Misogynist, anti-capitalist, and class-conscious, novelist Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” takes a "Trainspotting" brand of glee in dismissing lifestyle mores and materialist limitations of American social existence. It plays like a boys-only video game where male audience members are players encouraged to kick over the machine that ate their quarters at the end of the game. For all of the controversy surrounding the movie for fear that young males will begin setting up fight clubs of their own all around the world, the theory is countered directly in the movie as Ed Norton’s nameless character comes to view his dimwitted, class-conscious Fight Club cohorts as complete morons — who, in Lou Reed's words, follow the first thing that comes along that allows them the right to be. Indeed the Fight Club cult that Norton sets up under the tutelage of his brutal disenfranchised alter ego/evil-twin, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), digresses into a flesh-chewing tombstone that gets dumped on the floor like so much brain matter. "Fight Club" is Fincher's cinematic Hail-Mary pass that the audience desperately wants to catch.

Rated R. 139 mins. (A) (Five Stars)