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Fight Club
20th Century Fox

Fight Club reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 66 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
9.3 out of 10
based on 35 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 161 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: R for disturbing and graphic depiction of violent anti-social behavior, sexuality and language

Starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf, and Jared Leto

The film's narrator (Norton) attends support groups of all kinds as a way to "experience" something within his unfeeling, commercial existence. On a business trip, he meets Tyler Durden (Pitt) who encourages them to form a fight club as a release for their latent aggressive tendencies.


GENRE(S): Drama  
WRITTEN BY: Chuck Palahniuk (novel)
Jim Uhls
 
DIRECTED BY: David Fincher  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: June 6, 2000 
Video: April 25, 2000 
Theatrical: October 15, 1999 
RUNNING TIME: 139 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: USA 

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100
San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham
Delivers a sucker punch to the audience and then pulls the rug out from under it. It is sensational. It is also grimly funny.
Read Full Review
100
Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Fight Club -- cue the blurb machine -- is a knockout.
100
Rolling Stone Peter Travers
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.
100
TNT RoughCut Graham Verdon
Frighteningly intelligent and visually stunning film.
100
Film.com Gemma Files
It always surprises, never bores. It's also just damn good, on every possible level -- so go see it. Now.
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100
Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
A knockout...So feverish is Fight Club...that thermometer contact might make mercury shatter.
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91
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak
It assaults us with violence, brutality, sexual confusion and anarchy and has enough bruising, punishing humor to keep us laughing with relief.
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90
Variety David Rooney
Bold, inventive, sustained adrenaline rush of a movie.
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89
Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Fight Club's dirty little secret is it's one of the best comedies of the decade.
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88
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
It's a genuine shocker - a dazzler of a film - a hellishly funny picture.
88
San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris
It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.
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80
Film.com Robert Horton
Never less than dazzling to look at, and the scorching humor keeps it alive from scene to scene.
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80
TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
A brilliantly realized series of sucker punches, a philosophical howl disguised as a muscular guy movie.
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80
The New York Times Elvis Mitchell
The sardonic, testosterone-fueled science fiction of Fight Club touches a raw nerve.
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75
Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
As a piece of storytelling, Fight Club is a bit of a dud: It's a good 15 minutes too long, and the tension doesn't build the way you wish it would.
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75
Boston Globe Jay Carr
Begins with that invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz. But its chic indictment of empty materialist values fizzles.
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75
New York Post Lou Lumenick
Fight Club badly wants to be "A Clockwork Orange" for the millennium - and succeeds to a surprising extent until director David Fincher ends up sucker-punching the audience.
75
Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
It's visually surrealistic, acted with integrity, so brutal in spots that I averted my eyes.
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70
Time Richard Schickel
Both actors are excellent--but there's something conventionally gimmicky about the way it plays its reality/unreality game.
70
Washington Post Stephen Hunter
A provocative experience that lights you up even as it brutalizes you. And I don't even like Brad Pitt very much.
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66
Mr. Showbiz Michael Atkinson
Despite terrific comic acting...and an atomic first hour, Fight Club makes a few wrong turns and ends up lost itself.
63
Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday
Keeps filmgoers wondering what will happen next even as they are repulsed by what's happening in front of them.
63
USA Today Mike Clark
It's fun to talk about...but the price you pay is enduring its excesses and pummeled-home thematic points.
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60
Newsweek David Ansen
The most incendiary movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time. It's a mess, but one worth fighting about.
60
LA Weekly Manohla Dargis
On a purely visual level, it's the most powerful and viscerally exciting movie to come out of Hollywood this year. Which doesn't mean that it's all good.
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50
Village Voice J. Hoberman
This malevolently gleeful satire...is extremely funny, surprisingly well- acted, and boldly designed...at least until its steel-and-chrome soufflé falls apart.
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50
New York Daily News Jami Bernard
Grueling and bleak, but not unintelligent...although it's hardly groundbreaking just because everyone's face gets pulpy.
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50
Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Undermines its serious undertones with an avalanche of smirky cynicism designed to flatter the hipper-than-thou fantasies of adolescent moviegoers.
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50
Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
But imagination and energy are often not enough. On balance, this is the dumbest of the entries in Hollywood's anti-consumerist new wave.
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50
Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
This exercise in mainstream masochism, macho posturing, and designer-grunge fascism is borderline ridiculous. But it also happens to be David Fincher's richest movie.
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50
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get.
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40
Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf
Fight Club is to intelligent men what Catherine Breillat's "Romance" is to intelligent women -- an insult.
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40
Film.com Tom Keogh
This much-anticipated but terribly underwhelming black comedy represents a seriously squandered opportunity.
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30
Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
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.
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25
Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
If, as Fincher has said, this movie is supposed to be funny, then the joke's on us.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 9.3 (out of 10) based on 161 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Michael C gave it an8:
This movie leaves very little to be desired. The mind-bending double personality aspect of it, while entertaining and mildly frightening, leaves one aspect tough to understand: which Durden was where at any given time? It was never fully explained, and it was a bit annoying to turn off the movie thinking "Wait, which one was in that one scene then?" If they had gone to lengths to explain this, it would have been a better film. Still, it's an amazing featuring of Pitt, Norton, and Carter's amazing acting.

Luke C gave it a10:
Could not have been done any better. One of the few movies that you will never get tired of watching. Classic.

Clif Carneiro gave it a10:
Perfection is not debatable! One of the best movies of the past decade (90's).

Norm R. gave it a10:
A perfect quirky movie. Great twists and great plot. And funny. But for me, the underlying message is the problem of the modern male whose masculinity is constantly under siege which in one scene or more scenes this takes a liiteral bent.

tim R gave it a10:
Beautifully damaged characters.

Janet C gave it a9:
Great film! Don't understand the haters...if it didn't live up to the book, then fine. But if you have some other reason, I do not see it.

BloodRusher gave it a10:
Its not a good movie, its not one of the best, its a f*cking perfect movie!

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