Once more, David Fincher shows us to expect the unexpected. Once more, we the audience, are drawn into a story and given pieces of a puzzle that seem to solve towards a detailed landscape but incredibly turn out to be a lion. Once more, while we are given to expect that x + y = z, Fincher gives us x + y = g. And once more, David Fincher succeeds with cinematic flair.

If you can make it past the brutality.

Part and parcel to Fight Club is the bare-fisted, pugilistic sensibility that will undeniably lose a good portion of the more delicate viewers (bless them!), but for those jaded by years of Hollywood violence, Fight Club will seem a revelation of great film-making amidst the dearth of mediocrity passing for greatness. Fight Club does not merely depict gruesome brawl after gruesome brawl. Its violence and mayhem serve well the story of a man trapped in a wasted life.

Jack, played with sublime concentration by Ed Norton (Primal Fear, The People vs. Larry Flint, American History X), works sleeplessly for a Big Name manufacturer of automobiles, investigating horrific part-failures in order to determine the validity of a company recall. Jack doesn’t sleep. His job and grip on reality are suffering. At a doctor’s cynical advice, he begins attending a support group for men with testicular cancer and finds a strange release in the focus of the group; soon he is attending these groups every night of the week. This, being just what the doctor ordered, breaks his pattern of insomnia ("Babies don’t sleep this good") and things begin to look up for Jack—until Marla Singer enters the scene.

Jack, in narration, reveals that Marla, a decidedly non-Victorian Helena Bonham Carter (Hamlet, Howard’s End, Wing’s of the Dove), is in a sense the beginning of his real troubles. The reason for this, while imminently guessable, is never openly demonstrated during the film, but as with many things in Fight Club, the regular viewer won’t figure it out until after he has left the theater. In any case, Marla (another support group "tourist") so disrupts Jack’s experience within the groups that his insomnia begins anew.

It is just about this time that Jack meets Tyler Durden, a remarkable Brad Pitt (who also starred in Fincher’s Se7en). Tyler is a uncanny man with an uncommon knowledge of the world around him and a strange sense of wisdom; and he sells soap. Just after his chance meeting with Tyler, Jack returns to his apartment building to find that his apartment has blown up and he is now homeless. Imbued with the surrealistic state of losing everything you own, he asks Tyler if he can stay over at his house. Tyler readily consents and then asks Jack to punch him as hard as he can. So begins a strange sort of fisticuffs-therapy: Jack punches Tyler and Tyler punches Jack and soon spectators want to join in. Thusly is "Fight Club" born.

So is Fight Club a film merely about bare-knuckled grown men beating their worries away? Not remotely. Will I reveal what it is really about? Absolutely not (remember the first and second rules of fight club: "You do not talk about Fight Club"). Suffice it to say, the movies title does something of an injustice in that those who have only seen the trailers will likely be under the impression that Fight Club just a boxing movie. Ah, more’s the shame.

In any case, Fight Club is easily one of the best films of 1999. Fincher’s stylistic editing and cinematography actually serve the manic pace of the story (unlike so many modern films essayed by faux-artiste directors who strive to be bold and different merely for the sake of being bold and different) and create a gritty panic in the audience. The script is incredibly strong and doesn’t slow down for one minute—if you don’t catch something, you won’t have time to ask your buddy what was just said—and there isn’t a single cheesy line to make you snicker in the whole film. All the performances are strong (especially good is Norton’s almost monotoned narration) and possibly even Oscar-worthy. Even the techno-rythyms on the sound track raise the films tension that indefinable notch between goodness and greatness.

All I can really say is "Wow!"