Freeview film of the day: Fight Club

Fight Club ★★★★★
11.00pm-1.50am 5STAR

There’s a big twist at the end of David Fincher’s witty, anarchic and disturbing movie that’s certainly shocking and worth waiting for even if, like me, you find it unconvincing. The narrator, Edward Norton, is a depressed insomniac until he meets Brad Pitt, who offers him a home when his is destroyed by fire and introduces him to the Fight Club. Pitt is a free spirit who makes his own rules and the Fight Club, whose members are sworn to secrecy, is a place where young men, feeling themselves emasculated by modern life, can beat each other up and find self-expression by inflicting and suffering pain. Soon there are clubs all over the country and Pitt then leads the members in a different, even more violent direction, involving vandalism and subversion. Whether the film advocates and supports Pitt’s philosophy, or is a warning against it, is for the viewer to decide, but it’s gripping and, at least for a while, thought-provoking.