"Norton plays Jack, a generic name for a generic guy. He's a mild-mannered corporate drone whose complacently consumerist lifestyle is turned inside out when he encounters one Tyler Durden. The punkishly anarchic Durden (Pitt) is everything Jack would like to be but isn't, his own walking, talking id. Like Terry Southern's Magic Christian, Durden expresses his repugnance of society's materialistic values in a series of actes gratuits of mischievous subversion. Moonlighting as a cinema projectionist, he splices single, subliminally registered frames from pornographic films into bland mainstream fare; moonlighting as a waiter in a swanky restaurant, he pees into the oxtail soup. Bare-knuckled and bare-chested, the two of them start pummelling one another for thrills, only gradually discovering that there's a whole world out there of emasculated American males just waiting for an opportunity to let the sweat, blood and sperm pent up within them ooze out from every pore. Well, why not? It's a promising idea for a film, especially a satirical comedy, which is what Fight Club unambiguously is for its first half-hour. Fincher is a vulgar, flashy film-maker (he directed Seven and The Game) who doesn't so much make films as take them, the way we refer to a photographer taking, rather than making, photographs: he's interested only in surfaces and he likes even grunge to glitter. (The French, as usual, coined the perfect expression for this style: le look.) He's a sharp scriptwriter, however, and Norton's omnipresent voice-off narration, coupled with the subject's sociological relevance (cf Susan Faludi's new book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man), initially sucks one in."