Ugh!

"Deeply misogynistic!" — Susan Stark, The Detroit News

Awfff!

"Macho porn!" — Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times

Ouch!

Don't expect to see any of the above quotes in movie ads for "Fight Club" (although, come to think of it, if Fox did decide to use 'em, it would certainly be in keeping with the gleefully subversive, anti-consumerist spirit of this major studio movie). "Fight Club," a brutally funny and provocative satire directed by David Fincher ("Seven"), may have scored a late-round box office victory in its first weekend, but it also received a vicious pummeling from a number of (mostly mainstream) critics. While some reviewers praised the film as "an apocalyptic comedy of rage" (Jay Carr, Boston Globe) and "an uncompromising American classic" (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone), those who felt less enthusiastic about the picture didn't just dislike it -- they loathed it, reviled it, demonized it.

A number of these critical low-blows and wild punches, however, were almost as irresponsible and off-target as the writers accused the movie of being. Hollywood Reporter editor Anita M. Busch was so outraged that she suffered premonition fits: "'Fight Club' will, no doubt, become Washington's poster child for what's wrong with Hollywood. And Washington, for once, will be right. The film is exactly the kind of product that lawmakers should target for being socially irresponsible in a nation that has deteriorated to the point of Columbine." (Them's fightin' words, and in response to the Reporter's ranting, 20th Century Fox pulled all advertising from the trade paper indefinitely. Which didn't last long.)

In the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, some writers were genuinely concerned that the movie might inspire copycat beatings or bombings. Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times, acknowledged that the film has "levels of irony and commentary above and below the action," but he worried: "[W]hatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get." Wrote Ebert: "I think it's the numbing effect of movies like this that cause people to go a little crazy."

Meanwhile, both Busch and the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan were aghast that the movie's stylized, flash-frame nudity and relentlessly barbaric fight scenes had not earned it an NC-17 rating from the MPAA. They have a point — and, of course, if certain major newspapers would agree to accept advertising for NC-17-rated movies, and if certain major theater chains would agree to show them, and if certain major video store chains would agree to stock them ... then Hollywood might actually be allowed to create and exhibit movies made by and for adults that are rated for adults only. Indeed, the way that corporations such as these exert repressive, paternalistic control over so many parts of our lives -- and the barely contained rage that builds up inside people as a consequence -- is one of the themes of "Fight Club."