1. Fight Club (1999)
Nortons Character: The Narrator
Why It Was Awesome: One word usually epitomizes how most people feel after watching Fight Club David Finchers adrenaline-fuelled adaptation of Chuck Palahnuiks novel - for the first time: Wow. You might think youre going into an action movie from the title and the trailer alone, but youre not. Youre going in to one of the most vital, irreverent and cerebral comedies available for audience consumption. Yes its a comedy, at heart. Its not all outwardly hilarious though; sometimes its shocking, sometimes purposely provocative, sometimes its perverse. But its always, somewhere deep down, pretty damn funny. You might have risked losing a lesser actor into the background by putting him next to Brad Pitt at this stage of his career. And true, Pitt is on fire in Fight Club but Norton somehow steals the show as his exact opposite. Pitt oozes amorality, hes alive with passion and he loves a good scrap but Norton is at first unassuming, and plays down-on-his-luck-but-holding-it-together seemingly with complete believability. The coup de grace for Norton though is when he and Pitts Tyler Durden start to bleed together; Norton manages to bring out a venomous, yet masterfully controlled bile from somewhere within himself that literally blows away every other performer thats unfortunate enough to share screen time with him, Meatloaf and his bitch-tits included. If you havent seen this movie, what the f*ck are you still doing here? Go, buy it, you will not regret it for a second.