OCTOBER 25, 1999: David Fincher’s ‘Fight Club’ is a movie that grasps greatness, and then lets it slip away in a blur of its own cleverness. Make no mistake—this is a fine film, with moments as mesmerizing and powerful as any I’ve seen on a movie screen this year. But Fincher and his screenplay let the story take a twist two-thirds of the way into the film that lessens its blows and damages the power of its narrative, and it ultimately never recovers.

This turn, and its effect on the film, is all the more depressing because for ninety or so minutes, ‘Fight Club’ is a brilliant, kinetic, sylish piece of late 90’s filmmaking—nearly as good as Fincher’s 1995 masterpiece, ‘Seven’. Edward Norton stars as an insomniac corporate drone who’s become so involved in materialistic commercialism and so detached from real human emotion that he attends support groups for alcoholics, the recovering sick, and the terminally ill, hoping to just feel something. Anything.

Into this desperate existence wanders Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt, in a fine, twisted performance), a career nobody. He has two part-time jobs: as a waiter in a ritzy hotel, where he proudly urinates in the food, and as a movie projectionist (a brilliant sequence shows exactly how he inserts flashes of pornography into films at the reel change). Taking in Norton’s unhappiness, he challenges him to a fistfight, and a new therapy, a new outlet for human contact, is born. The two men start up Fight Clubs for other seeking similar outlets, but when Durden ups the ante, things start to get wildly out of control.

So far, so good. Fincher has shot the film in his usual dark but hyper style, the acting by Norton, Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter is stand-out, and the Dust Brothers’ music is spot-on. There’s also a good number of very cool post-modern touches—I liked not only the previously mentioned projectionist sequence, but the montage where the camera shakes at Pitt’s mug so much, we see sprocket holes on the edge of the frame. Nice.

And then the movie takes a turn. SPOILER ALERT! Once again, if you haven’t seen the movie, read no further. It is not my intention to give away the twist of this movie—although, in all honesty, I don’t think it’s that hard to figure out. I had it pegged going in to the movie, based on two pieces of information:

1) That there was a ‘Usual Suspects’-style twist ending, and

2) That Norton’s character was billed as ‘The Narrator’.

And I have liked twist endings before. ‘The Usual Suspects’ is one of my favorite movies, and I was deeply moved by the turn at the end of ‘The Sixth Sense’ this summer. The twist in the final scene of ‘No Way Out’ puts the entire film into a different light. But in ‘Fight Club’, the twist does not feel motivated by the story, nor does it feel necessary to make the film more powerful. In fact, I think it lessens the impact of what we have seen before. It feels like a filmmaker scraping the bottom of his bag of tricks.

Why did I respond this way to this twist ending, and not the others I’ve mentioned? Because, simply, those twists felt like a fascinating way to pull the movie into an entirely different focus, and this one felt like Fincher and his writers being clever simply for the sake of being clever. Some of it may have to do with the timing, as well: All three of those films revealed their turn in the last scene, where ‘Fight Club’ still has over a half hour of movie left for us to try and noodle through what came before it. A little distracting? Uh huh.

For example: In true ‘Suspects’ fashion, we see previous scenes, now different in light of our new information. And we see Norton beating himself up on a street when previously he and Pitt had been fighting. Would the guys who view this have really reacted in the same way? And what about the scenes where both Pitt and Norton interact with other people? How are we supposed to interpret the scene where they argue in the front seat of a car while two underlings occasionally pitch in from the back? These aren’t the kind of things I should be thinking about during the end of a movie—I should be thinking about the end of the movie.

But above all, the main problem is that the twist makes for a far less interesting conflict. Maybe some find the kind of inner turmoil that would cause Norton to create a split personality fascinating; I found it far less interesting than the power struggle/jealousy tension that was developing between their characters. We know that as out-of-control as the split might be, Norton still ultimately controls it, somehow. He could never have that kind of control over the Tyler Durden character as we know him from the first half. The development of their dynamic could have made the second half of this film as electrifying as the first.

However, that being said, it should be noted that even with this fatal flaw, ‘Fight Club’ is still an excellent film and should absolutely be seen—its shallow showing at the box office is bewildering, in light of the smart ad campaign and marquee star. Are audiences not recommending it? It’s possible. Back in 1995, Roger Ebert gave a one-star pan to ‘The Usual Suspects’, in which he said that the twist left him feeling cheated. I still don’t agree with that review. But now I understand it a little better.