Critics reviews

"Fight Club" doesn’t offer answers to the struggles of the world, but a critique. It’s not a celebration of directionless men, but rather that the modern world had commodified everything to the point where toxic masculinity becomes its own brand... What "Fight Club" understands is that the modern male is in an incredibly tenuous place when he becomes disconnected from his own emotions and healthy ways of expressing those emotions.

Stylistically, the film is, at times, very cool. But it’s this same cool factor that makes the film so often misunderstood. Is Tyler Durden a hero or a villain? The visual storytelling is misleading and the actual satire is confusing and ineffective.

The film does recognize a phenomenon where men are waking in anger from a culture intended to numb or emasculate them, but it also sees in that the presence of sickening misogyny and the potential for fascism... What "Fight Club" missed in 1999 – and comes oh-so-close to getting – is how much the rage it identifies is connected to white supremacy.

If "Fight Club" falters somewhat by diagnosing a problem while dismissing all the solutions, there’s nonetheless a warped but very real sense of hope in its final image of a boy and girl holding hands while the world collapses around them. "Fight Club" is funny, scary, messy, and imperfect, and there’s a reason it continues to endure. It met us at a very strange time in our lives.

Never arbitrary, Fincher's carefully assembled aesthetic overload captures perfectly the anxiety of the so-called Information Age even when the film's sociopolitical stance becomes muddled. As for that critical knot, tied either out of naivety or cynicism (and which Robin Wood attempts, fairly brilliantly, to untangle in his introduction to Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond), it manages to make the film linger in the mind regardless of one's interpretation.

[The film's] effectiveness lies in the timing of shock moments that invariably threaten to make you laugh, despite the political incorrectness of it all.

"Fight Club" is one movie that exactly caught the pre-millennial tension. Great performances, stunning visuals and a plot like nothing you've ever seen - one of the films of the year.

The awful truth is that "Fight Club" jettisons its sense of humour 60 minutes in, and, so far from satirising the tiresome "crisis of masculinity" stuff sloshing around the airwaves either side of the Atlantic, the film simply endorses it, with Tyler presented as a deeply interesting Zeitgeist anti-hero. And, in the end, this just doesn't pack much of a punch.

My take is that "Fight Club" is pro-thinking, no matter what deities are offended. Is that threatening? You bet... Fincher’s refusal to moralize and reassure has pissed off the watchdogs of virtue. Let ’em bark. They think anything alive is dangerous. "Fight Club" pulls you in, challenges your prejudices, rocks your world and leaves you laughing in the face of an abyss. It’s alive, all right. It’s also an uncompromising American classic.

If watched sufficiently mindlessly, ["Fight Club"] might be mistaken for a dangerous endorsement of totalitarian tactics and super-violent nihilism in an all-out assault on society. But this is a much less gruesome film than "Seven" and a notably more serious one. It means to explore the lure of violence in an even more dangerously regimented, dehumanized culture. That's a hard thing to illustrate this powerfully without, so to speak, stepping on a few toes.

The movie is so full of ideas and anger that it has great difficulty finding a story form to organize them. It's only consistency is its tone, largely controlled by Jack's deadpan-hip narration full of brilliant grace notes... ["Fight Club"] is indefensible, which is what is so cool about it. It's a screed against all that's holy and noble in man, a yelp from the black hole. It's a sharp stick in the eye.

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. That is a scary notion indeed.