This is a particularly weird one, but stick with it - especially because the people behind the unofficial retelling have basically copped to it. Fight Club is a classic of the late-nineties male mentality, when dudes across the Western world were convinced they were being emasculated by the rise of consumer culture and the so-called "metrosexual". Rather than doing the whole hunter-gatherer thing our lizard brains insisted upon, we were nesting in our own homes with flat-pack Ikea furniture and wasting our lives watching TV. What we should've been doing is dreaming up imaginary friends and fighting strangers, topless, in the basements below seedy dive bars, right? Who's with us? It's a silly story when you put it like that and, well, it's also pretty silly in practice. The whole film is about Ed Norton's unnamed narrator trying to reclaim some supposedly lost part of his masculinity, mainly by opting out of modern culture - his office job, his nice house, his respectable life - in favour of something more visceral, more pure. Or more childish, depending on your point of view. And then it all turns out to be leading up to a terrorist scheme to explode a load of banks and free the world of their corporate tyranny, dreamt up by Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden who - SPOILERS! - is actually a figment of Norton's imagination. There's no such twist ending to Old School, the frat boy comedy starring Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughan and Will Ferrell. Otherwise, though, it's a pretty faithful retelling of Fight Club, albeit making it wholly humorous in the same way Airheads did for Dog Day Afternoon. Director Todd Phillips admits as much in the film's DVD commentary, with entire lines of dialogue dropped into Luke Wilson's character as he swaps his unfulfilling life for running a university fraternity. During which time he spends a lot of time in basements with dudes. And at one point gets caught using the copier for non-work stuff. Seriously, Chuck Palahniuk should've probably consulted his lawyer. Although he never came up with anything as inspired as this.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
