Herald rating: * * *
Running time: 100 mins
Rental: Today
Review: Ewan McDonald
It was the book that every publisher wanted but shied away from, the movie that every director and star wanted but was scared by.
Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel about corporate mayhem and serial killing was passed from one publishing house to another before it became a bestseller.
The film project went through screenplays, directors and actors for years. Oliver Stone planned to star Leonardo DiCaprio before Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol) won the negotiations and cast Christian Bale. Herald critics put her movie, "less gruesome, more comical" than the book, in their top 20 for last year.
Patrick Bateman is a feral animal, a narcissistic, designer label-obsessed Wall Street suit. His circle is in a daily guerrilla war with one another over clothes, offices, salaries and getting good tables in restaurants, about whose body is buffer.
Bateman takes it a little further: he murders a lot of people, mainly women, in nasty ways.
Business rage, just one step along from the frustrations of road rage, golf course rage or abuse in director Harron's view.
Well, maybe he murders them. The killings might happen in Bateman's disintegrating mind.
But this is not a slasher movie. None of the murders happen on-screen. What happens on screen is a masterful performance by Bale — which is why our critics, and others, acclaim what is truly a nasty piece of work.
<i>Video:</i> American Psycho
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