Cineaste's Gary Crowdus summarized the critical reception at the time, "Many critics praised Fight Club, hailing it as one of the most exciting, original, and thought-provoking films of the year." He wrote of the negative opinion, "While Fight Club had numerous critical champions, the film's critical attackers were far more vocal, a negative chorus which became hysterical about what they felt to be the excessively graphic scenes of fisticuffs ... They felt such scenes served only as a mindless glamorization of brutality, a morally irresponsible portrayal, which they feared might encourage impressionable young male viewers to set up their own real-life fight clubs in order to beat each other senseless."[94] When Fight Club premiered at the 56th Venice International Film Festival, the film was fiercely debated by critics. A newspaper reported, "Many loved and hated it in equal measures." Some critics expressed concern that the film would incite copycat behavior, such as that seen after A Clockwork Orange debuted in Britain nearly three decades previously.[95] Upon the film's theatrical release, The Times reported the reaction, "It touched a nerve in the male psyche that was debated in newspapers across the world."[96] Although the film's makers called Fight Club "an accurate portrayal of men in the 1990s," some critics called it "irresponsible and appalling." Writing for The Australian, Christopher Goodwin stated, "Fight Club is shaping up to be the most contentious mainstream Hollywood meditation on violence since Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange."[97]
Janet Maslin, reviewing for The New York Times, praised Fincher's direction and editing of the film. She wrote that Fight Club carried a message of "contemporary manhood", and that, if not watched closely, the film could be misconstrued as an endorsement of violence and nihilism.[98] Roger Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave Fight Club two stars out of four, calling it "visceral and hard-edged", but also "a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy", whose promising first act is followed by a second that panders to macho sensibilities and a third he dismissed as "trickery".[99] Ebert later acknowledged that the film was "beloved by most, not by me".[100] He was later requested to have a shot-by-shot analysis of Fight Club at the Conference on World Affairs; he stated that "[s]eeing it over the course of a week, I admired its skill even more, and its thought even less."[101] Jay Carr of The Boston Globe opined that the film began with an "invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz", but that it eventually became "explosively silly".[102] Newsweek's David Ansen described Fight Club as "an outrageous mixture of brilliant technique, puerile philosophizing, trenchant satire and sensory overload" and thought that the ending was too pretentious.[103] Richard Schickel of Time described the mise en scène as dark and damp: "It enforces the contrast between the sterilities of his characters' aboveground life and their underground one. Water, even when it's polluted, is the source of life; blood, even when it's carelessly spilled, is the symbol of life being fully lived. To put his point simply: it's better to be wet than dry." Schickel applauded the performances of Pitt and Norton, but criticized the "conventionally gimmicky" unfolding and the failure to make Bonham Carter's character interesting.[104]
The film review website Metacritic surveyed 36 critics and assessed 24 reviews as positive, 10 as mixed, and 2 as negative. It gave an aggregate score of 67 out of 100, which it said indicated "generally favorable reviews".[105] The similar website Rotten Tomatoes surveyed 185 critics and, categorizing the reviews as positive or negative, assessed 148 as positive and 37 as negative. Of the 185 reviews, it determined an average rating of 7.4 out of 10. It gave the film a score of 80% and summarized the critical consensus, "Solid acting, amazing direction, and elaborate production design make Fight Club a wild ride."[106]
