American Psycho: Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman

Hello everybody! Today we have Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. You can check out Steven’s take on American Psycho from a few weeks ago here,

AMERICAN PSYCHO

DIRECTOR:  Mary Harron

STARRING: Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Josh Lucas, Samantha Mathis, Matt Ross, Bill Sage, Chloë Sevigny, Cara Seymour, Justin Theroux, Guinevere Turner, Reese Witherspoon

GENRE: Cult, Crime, Drama

YEAR: 2000

COUNTRY: United States

A wealthy New York investment banking executive hides his alternate psychopathic ego from his co-workers and friends as he escalates deeper into his illogical, gratuitous fantasies. Patrick Bateman, a young, well to do man working on wall street at his father’s company kills for no reason at all. As his life progresses his hatred for the world becomes more and more intense.

American Psycho is a film (spiritually) shot by Alfred Hitchcock on overdrive. In a masterful performance, Christian Bale approaches his role with utter seriousness. Patrick is a Jekyll-and-Hyde character. During the day, he’s the ultimate neatnik and a compulsive shopper. Panic for Patrick is not being able to get the right restaurant reservation, and fear comes from worrying that he’ll get a bad table. He is always concerned about his skin, which he pampers with dozens of expensive, organic, body care products.

My main problem with the film is a simple one. Why did they even bother cutting a few scenes — sorry about the pun — in order to get an R rather than an NC-17 rating? An NC-17 would have been a much more honest and appropriate rating for a film with such extremely black humor and explicit violence. The studio should have just marketed the movie as something for adults and bragged in the ads that it had to be an NC-17. So what if some movie theaters won’t show NC-17 films, and some newspapers won’t advertise them? If ever there was a movie that isn’t for everyone, it is American Psyco. Like Very Bad Things, which featured unabashedly morbid humor, American Psycho is a treat for the adventuresome filmgoer.

PROS:

• Exquisite Sets
• The film looks good.
• Christian Bale’s performance
• Patrick Bateman’s character

CONS:

• Cut to an R rating instead of NC-17
• Too much dark comedy

SCORE: 7.0 / 10

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