10 Spectacularly Wrong Movie Reviews

5. Everybody Hates On Fight Club

The film that made David Fincher, and the one that finally convinced people Brad Pitt was more than a pretty face, and the one which gave us yet another in our favourite sub-genre of modern cinema (Terrible Things Happening To Jared Leto; we're sure Netflix has come up with that one at some point). Fight Club is a relatively uncontested modern classic, a film which plays with genre, story and form conventions, with unreliable narrators, subliminal messages and the like. It far surpasses Chuck Palahniuk's novel, it has a kick-!*$% Pixies song over the end credits, it lets Helena Bonham Carter play a role other Tim Burton's stand in for his unrequited love for Johnny Depp. Everybody loves it now, right?

Well, yeah, but at the time of its release things were pretty different. In fact, when Fight Club came out in 1999, it was kind of a bomb. It made its money back and gained a following on DVD, but it earned sweet FA at the box office, owing partly to the bad reviews it received. Newsweek's David Ansen described it as puerile and pretentious, whilst no less an authority of films than Roger Ebert went in HAM on the film, characterising it as the "most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish, a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up", and decried the appearances of talented actors like Pitt and Edward Norton. One of those opinions of the dear departed Ebert which nobody would agree with.