Rating of
3/4
"American Psycho" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 05/21/12
Vain, empty stockbroker Patrick Bateman juggles his job in Wall Street with his nightly appetite for misogyny and homicide.
American Psycho is a smart adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ classic novel which, in the wrong hands, could easily have become a dimwitted gore-fest. Thankfully director Mary Harron saw the book for what it really is; a blackest of the black social satire full of laugh out loud moments.
Christian Bale is excellent as a vacuous yuppie who vents his murderous rage during his soulless quest for material gain and anyone who lived through the hateful and soulless excesses of the 1980’s cannot fail to be amused by its absurdities. He perfectly represents a society that is obsessed with surface appearance and self image, disguising the moral black hole at its centre.
If anything, the film is perhaps a little too lacking in gore; Bateman’s appalling actions could possibly have been shown a little more graphically to expose him as the monster he truly was, but its representation of a decade during which sociopathy was the accepted way of life is brilliant.
Slyly witty and surprisingly lacking in explicit violence, American Psycho is Fight Club’s angrier, scarier little brother.
