What did you think of "Fight Club"?   Good 80% 402   Bad 16% 81   Somewhere in between 4% 21 Total Votes   504

Verdict: A knockout social satire, and the kind of movie you're going to love or hate.

Details: Starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. Rated R for disturbing and graphic depiction of violent antisocial behavior, sexuality and profanity. 2 hours, 21 minutes.

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Review: The first rule of "Fight Club": You will love "Fight Club."

The second rule of "Fight Club": You will hate "Fight Club."

The third rule: Whether you see the movie or not, you'll hear a lot about it. Bound to be this fall's most controversial studio release, the Brad Pitt-Edward Norton flick will have as many people loathing it as liking it.

Either reaction is justifiable. The film is violent, nihilistic, intoxicated by its own bad-boy humor, and it's just about your worst choice if you're looking for something to watch on date night. A "guy movie" in the best and worst ways, the latest from David Fincher, director of "Seven" and "The Game," is also a brutally funny mind trip with timely (if exaggerated) things to say about late-millennial masculinity. Though it sags in its last act, and its Big Surprise Twist isn't nearly as clever as, say, the sucker punch in "The Sixth Sense," the audacity of the movie's first half overcomes the slack bits.

Norton stars as our unnamed narrator, a burned-out drudge for a car manufacturer who investigates fatal mechanical failures. When he isn't traveling from one wreck site to another, he spends time online, furnishing his condo. "What kind of dining set defines me as a person?" he asks himself, the film's pithy way of encapsulating the evolution (or is it diminution?) of the male species: once hunter-gatherers, now Ikea shoppers.

In his alienation, he finds emotional release by crashing 12-step programs and support groups, for everything from leukemia to testicular cancer. Into one of these walks the soon-to-be bane of his life, Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), puffing a cigarette and asking brusquely, "This is cancer, right?"

But the newcomer who changes his world is Tyler Durden (Pitt), a snaky guy's guy who manufactures homemade soap and spouts aphorisms such as "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything." After one of the movie's typically surreal plot twists, Norton's character moves in with him. Living in a leaky, ramshackle mansion, they're a couple of Peter Pans. Their nicotine-stained Wendy is the sardonic Marla, with whom Tyler begins a gymnastic sexual relationship that almost makes the house collapse, literally.

So what is Fight Club? It's the guys-only society that Tyler and the narrator create to measure their manhood. The point? To beat the teeth out of an opponent in a bare-knuckled battle in the basement of the local bar. Word spreads, and this secret cult grows nationwide. (It's one of the movie's paradoxes that, for all this machismo, the clandestine male bonding and the coded rituals recall closeted gay societies of the past.)

Tyler's actions lead to pranks, then mischievous terrorist activities. Some pundits may condemn the movie for irresponsibility in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and the epidemic of school and office shootings. In the film's defense, it is holding up a funhouse mirror to modern reality, not endorsing the characters' actions.

"Fight Club" underscores both the silliness and the dangers of any nascent fascist mentality, as the soldiers in Tyler's army infuse their leader's every statement with holy significance.

Fincher directs with his usual visual flair. Like much of the movie, the fights are shot with a mixture of glamour and grime — chiaroscuro paintings splashed with sweat. The editing has the slam-pow rhythm appropriate for the movie's muscular comic book energy.

The film indulges in the same sort of adolescent acting-out as its characters. It gleefully offers gross-out scenes, such as one that has Norton splattered by a bag of human fat, filched from a liposuction clinic. Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls (adapting Chuck Palahniuk's novel) don't hesitate to mock support groups and their members, including a dying woman who wants to have sex one last time, and burly Bob (Meat Loaf Aday), a cancer survivor whose treatments have caused him to grow enormous breasts. "Fight Club" also winks knowingly at the fact that it's a movie. One scene simulates the wobble of a strip of celluloid about to rip off its sprockets, and in another, Norton punctuates one dramatic speech with the voice-over, "I'd like to thank the academy."

Unfortunately, "Fight Club" is the sort of button-pushing, in-your-face flick the aging Academy Award voters probably won't get. Too bad. Along with the superior technical work, the movie shows off its three leads at their best. Norton and Pitt do expert variations on previous work, while Bonham Carter's sexy black widow performance should pry her out of period-movie corsets for good.

Love it or hate it, you won't forget "Fight Club." Like "Blue Velvet," "A Clockwork Orange" and "Brazil," it's one of those rare movies that creates an electrifying alternative universe on-screen — even while it's examining the splintered male psyche of our everyday world. It's a KO.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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