FILM REVIEW OF ''FIGHT CLUB'' (1999)

"Fight Club" (**** out of ****) is a knock-out!

Brad Pitt and Edward Norton co-star and spar in this bizarre but insightful bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred, pugilistic parable. "Fight Club" takes some mighty savage but satirical swings at consumerism, anarchy, and male impotence. "Se7en" & Alien 3" director David Fincher delivers another of his kinetically super-charged, darkly lensed, adrenaline-laced epics about guys gelded by a gilded society who come to life when they stain their fists with blood. At one point, Brad Pitt tells Edward Norton: Penned by "Jumper" scenarist Jim Uhls from Chuck Palahniuk's first novel, "Fight Club" appears to glorify violence, promote fascism, and degrade women. Instead, "Fight Club" denigrates the first, shows contempt for the second, and give Helen Bonham Carter her juiciest role in years.

"Fight Club" spins a yarn every bit as audacious, manipulative and exhilarating as Fincher's earlier opus "The Game." Edward Norton of "Rounders" serves as our narrator for this 140-minute marathon that goes the distance. Caged in a dead-end job, Norton files reams of car accident statistics for a major automaker. Essentially, he must calculate when the best interests of the company are served by paying off car crash survivors rather than demanding a recall. As the narrator states: "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." Anyway, the narrator flies everywhere to inspect these wrecks and begins to suffer from more than occupational jet lag.

Inevitably, our anonymous narrator turns into a depressed white-collar insomniac. Lack of sleep drives him to the hospital. Incredibly, his doctor refuses to give him any drugs. He suggests instead that our narrator attend a support group for survivors of testicular cancer so that he can appreciate what constitutes real pain. Surprisingly, Norton discovers that he can purge himself emotionally without fear of humiliation. Afterward, his burden sloughed off, he goes home to his luxuriously appointed condo, hits the sack and sleeps like a baby. Franz Kafka couldn't have captured the malaise of modern society as crisply as Jim Uhls has in "Fight Club." Soon our unnamed narrator begins to gleefully orchestrate his life around these 12-step meetings and support groups for habits and diseases that he doesn't have. He is hooked and happy about until Marla Singer (Helen Bonham Carter of "Hamlet") spoils these gatherings. He knows that she is a fraud and fears she will expose him. They snarl at each other but call a truce and form an uneasy alliance. They will alternate nights at different groups so they won't collide with each other.

Marla poses few problems compared with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt of "The Score"), a mysterious maverick of a man encountered by our hero during a bumpy plane ride. Durden epitomizes cool; he has everything our narrator lacks. Self-assured, scruffily clad, with all the hypnotic charm of a snake, Durden lurks around the narrator. When they form Fight Club, Tyler lists the rules: "The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: someone yells "stop!", goes limp, taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: No shirts, no shoes. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight." Tyler attracts followers like a magnet. After an unknown arsonist destroys our narrator's condo, he hooks up with Tyler. They create "Fight Club," a form of underground tough man boxing.

Remember "Every Which Way But Loose," with Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson in "Hard Times?" They fight in dark, dank basements. Fincher pulls no punches when the combatants start swinging at each other. Quite simply, these fights are brutal, especially when a pretty boy (Jared Leto of "Urban Legend") is battered to a pulp until he resembles the elephant kid. Only the knuckle-headed will exit "Fight Club" looking for an excuse to scrap. The friendship between Tyler and our hero takes some wildly out-of-control turns. Tyler takes "Fight Club" to other cities, and then movies to the next level with "Project Mayhem," a demolitionist's fantasy that involves destroying credit card corporations. Our hero balks at Tyler's outlandish aims and the mindless, skin-headed idiots that he recruits for his cause. But it isn't until the third act, so to speak, when "Fight Club" decks you with a shocking revelation: Tyler Durden may not be who we think he is.

"Fight Club" will send some audiences reeling in disgust at its sicko shenanigans—like when Durden urinates in the soap at an expensive restaurant where he waits tables. Don't ask what he puts in the clam chowder. When Tyler works as a projectionist at a movie theatre, he splices frames of male genitalia into family movies! If you cannot handle a film poling fun at you, you probably won't appreciate some of the subversive humor. Twentieth Century Fox appears to have gone out of its way to sanitize "Fight Club," but Fincher is such a good director that his visuals contain more bite than his narrative. Like in "The Game," where Michael Douglas' snotty rich guy had to run a grueling gauntlet—a present of sorts for the man who has everything—"Fight Club" lowers the boom on hypocrisy. The Uhls script brims with several snappy and quotable one-liners.

"Fight Club" will strike some people as pretty strange, too. Any movie that never reveals its hero's name, especially when he provides the narration, is probably too pretentious for its own good. Nevertheless, the performances are flawless, particularly the two leads as well as Meatloaf as Robert 'Bob' Paulson. Meatloaf plays the most outlandish character and milks the role for everything that it is worth. As Marla Singer, Helena Bonham Carter is equally as funny and brilliant as both Pitt and Norton. "Fight Club" emerges as an abrasive movie, and Fincher digs his satirical claws in deep. We live in a media jungle, and "Fight Club" smirks at the notion that we would want to destroy it to return to lives of quiet destitution. With "Fight Club," Fincher matches anything that Stanley Kubrick helmed in his prime and shows Terry Gilliam a trick or two.

"Fight Club" ranks as the main event of the millennium.

FILM REVIEW OF ''FIGHTING'' (2009)

The running joke about most movies made in New York City is that penny-pinching producers usually shoot spectacular aerial long vistas of the Big Apple and then lens everything else either in Canada or on a Hollywood back lot. If you're ever visited N.Y.C., you can spot the difference between the actual locale, usually unkempt and teeming with humanity, and the comparative tidiness of Toronto or an immaculate Hollywood soundstage. Award winning Sundance film director Dito Montiel of "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," shot his new movie "Fighting" (** out of ****) with Channing Tatum on the mean streets of ‘the city that never sleeps’ where Montiel grew up. The terrific authenticity of Gotham, however, cannot compensate for "Fighting's" punch-drunk plot about illegal street fighting.

If you've seen any of the dozens of movies since "Hard Times" (1975) with Charles Bronson," "Every Which Way But Loose" (1978) with Clint Eastwood, "Lionheart" (1990) with Jean Claude Van Damme," "Fight Club" (1999) with Edward Norton and “Snatch” with Brad Pit, about underground bare knuckles boxing, you've caught the cream of the crop. Generic from the get-go, "Fighting" amounts to little more than a sluggish knuckle-sandwich saga that telegraphs its every surprise far in advance.

Shawn MacArthur (Cullman, Alabama, native Channing Tatum of "Step Up") hasn't been in the Big Apple long. He earns his keep selling books on the sidewalk. The first time Shawn tries to pedal his product with other vendors on Broadway, several street hoods attack him and steal his money. He swaps blows with one of them and puts the guy down for the count. Watching this fracas from the periphery, eagle-eyed Harvey Boarden (Terence Howard of "Iron Man") admires the way that Shawn defends himself from multiple attackers. Not surprisingly, Shawn's assailants work for Harvey who earns his money by hustling the streets when he isn't selling fake Broadway tickets.

Eventually, Shawn and Harvey cross each other's paths. Initially, Shawn just wants the dough back that Harvey’s henchmen stole from him. Harvey convinces Shawn that he can earn $5-thousand and more by participating in illegal street fights. Gradually, Shawn and Harvey grow to trust each other, but beneath the surface simmers an unstated tension between them. Basically, Harvey sees Shawn as his ticket to prosperity. Harvey hails from Chicago. He came to N.Y.C. with the dream of opening an IHOP, while Shawn is fresh out of Birmingham, Alabama, after he parted company with his wrestling coach father following a family dispute. Shawn's past catches up with him in the character of arrogant Evan Hailey (Brian J. White of "12 Rounds") who was a member of Shawn's father's wrestling team. When Shawn and Evan tangled in a fight, Shawn's father tried to intervene and Shawn put the smack down on dad. Indeed, trouble with fathers is a theme that Montiel explored in depth in his first feature “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.”

Montiel choreographs each of Shawn's brawls with a sloppy, improvised realism so you see these goons grapple with each other more than swap old-fashion, John Wayne type right crosses. Unfortunately, these slugfests lack the ferocious intensity of last year's bare knuckled high school drama "Never Back Down." Instead, Tatum and his opponents engage in free-for-all bouts that resemble the fistfights from the second-rate survivalist saga "The Condemned" (2007) where the combatants pounded on each other, but we never saw fists smash flesh. What stands out about these fights is the locales. Montiel stages this fights in Gotham’s ethnic neighborhoods, such as the Russian enclaves in Brooklyn and the Hispanic hang0uts in the Bronx.

The villains are an anemic. Martinez (Luis Guzman of "Carlito's Way") and Jack Dancing (Roger Guenveur Smith of "American Gangster") are Harvey's old friends, but they show him no respect. They want to eliminate Harvey and take on Shawn as their own boxer. Meanwhile, Shawn and Evan talk tough to each other about old times in Dixie. Evan openly antagonizes Shawn. Nevertheless, these villains prove too lightweight to be intimidating. They never do anything really heinous to get our collective goat, so we have no reason to savor their demise.

Good fight movies make you want to shadow box, but the fights in "Fighting" lack any energy. Sadly, too, we are deprived of the inevitable training sequence that is part and parcel of any good Palookaville potboiler. Here, our protagonist engages in a quick workout on a subway. Later, in one of his bouts, Shawn takes on an opponent versed in martial arts with predictable results. As charismatic as our hero is, he never earns our admiration, because he never gets truly beaten to a pulp. He is just too lucky.

Montiel penned the script with Robert Munic of TV's "The Cleaner." "Fighting" qualifies as little more than an anthology of cauliflowered clichés and stereotypes from boxing movies. The relationship between Harvey and Shawn grows complicated when Harvey arranges a $100-thousand winner take-all-purse and struggles to persuade Shawn to throw the fight. This is one of those boxing plots as old as either "Golden Boy" (1939) with William Holden or "The Set-Up" (1949) with Robert Ryan and more recently Bruce Willis in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" (1994). Naturally, Montiel and Munic provide our hero with some time out for romance. He meets cute, sexy Zulay Valdez (Zulay Heano of "Grizzly Park") who makes ends meet in a private club as an underpaid, overworked, single-mom waitress with a young daughter and a stern, drill sergeant of a mother (scene stealing 78 year old Altagracia Guzman)who never gives Shawn a break.

Tatum channels Marlon Brando, mumbling his dialogue and behaving so casually that he doesn't appear to be acting. Clearly, Tatum is an up and coming cinematic contender, a handsome but hard-bitten hero in the Vin Diesel mode. Terence Howard, who is usually very good, looks miscast. He doesn't look as desperate for success as his character complains about being, while Zulay Henao doesn't garner enough on-screen to time to make much of an impression despite her high wattage smile.

"Fighting" isn't a tenth as good as Montiel's first film "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints." "Fighting" spends too much time pulling its punches to deliver any clout.