Film Review: American Psycho (2000)

There is a particular kind of disappointment reserved for films that had every reason to be good and squandered all of them. It is the disappointment I felt when I first sat down to write about Mary Harron's American Psycho for my Croatian-language pages back in 2000, and it is the disappointment that has only hardened with the years. Let me be clear from the outset that my verdict has not been revised: this is an important film, but not for any reason that has the slightest thing to do with its quality.

To understand why, one has to go back to the source. Bret Easton Ellis, the enfant terrible of American letters, had already scandalised the reading public with his debut Less Than Zero (1985), a brutal, morally vacant portrait of the golden youth of Los Angeles. Six years later came American Psycho, and with it a level of notoriety that had nothing to do with literary merit and everything to do with the fuss. The tale of a sadistic serial killer from the yuppie milieu shocked even the most hardened reader — not merely through the sheer volume of butchery, but because Ellis narrated it in the first person and refused to supply so much as a crumb of moral distance. He was duly denounced as amoral, and the usual political-correctness brigade — feminists, gay-rights campaigners and assorted professional worriers — took turns flinging mud. Small wonder, then, that although the screen rights had long since been bought, the novel had to wait years for a film.

When the producers finally plucked up the nerve, they hedged their bets at every turn. To spare the American studios any embarrassment — boycotts, pickets outside the offices and so on — the project was handed to a small Canadian outfit, Lions Gate. After much speculation about a specialist in controversy such as Oliver Stone, the director's chair went to the Canadian Mary Harron, presumably because her I Shot Andy Warhol had earned her a feminist reputation that might pre-empt the charge of misogyny. That plan misfired the moment rumours circulated that the lead would go to a teenybopper idol, Leonardo DiCaprio; the militant feminists rose as one and accused the producers of wrapping violence against women in palatable cellophane. The part eventually went to the British actor Christian Bale. The finished product ran into trouble with the MPAA, which, as ever, was less offended by the blood than by the sex; the promised NC-17 resistance crumbled and cuts were duly made (we in Croatia, mercifully, got the integral version). And in a publicity stunt that deserves to be remembered for all the wrong reasons, Lions Gate teamed up with the Hollywood Stock Exchange to run a prize game promising punters money if the film hit a certain audience quota. It missed. The punters went home empty-handed.

On paper the premise is magnificent: New York in the Reagan years, when the economic climate made overnight fortunes on the trading floor and turned greed and extreme materialism into the only conceivable worldview of the Manhattan yuppie. Patrick Bateman (Bale), a twenty-seven-year-old Wall Street vice-president, has everything — an astronomical salary, a luxury flat in the most exclusive quarter, expensive suits, dinner nowhere but the smartest restaurant, a fiancée, Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon), and a mistress, Courtney (Samantha Mathis). Yet he is dissatisfied: his friends and acquaintances all dress alike, dine alike and snort the same cocaine, so that Bateman is forever being mistaken for his colleague Paul Allen (Jared Leto), to whom he bears no resemblance whatsoever. Once he has buried a hatchet in his alter ego's skull and hidden the body, he discovers that sadistic murder is the one thing that breaks the monotony. He carries on killing, women being his favourite prey, and nobody — not the private detective Donald Kimball (Willem Dafoe), not his devoted secretary Jean (Chloë Sevigny) — suspects that the respectable businessman is a homicidal monster.

It should work. It does not, and the reason is that Harron and her co-writer Guinevere Turner — who also pops up on screen as one of Bateman's victims — took Ellis's material and bent it to their own agenda. Where Ellis (or at least those critics who reduced the novel to its bare bones) intended a kind of allegory of the soullessness of Reagan's America, a strained satire equating sadistic killers with unscrupulous stock-jobbers, the filmmakers went "off-message" and made a female-chauvinist allegory that would not have disgraced the authoress of The Vagina Monologues. On their reading, Bateman is not a monster because Reagan's America made him one; he is a monster because he is a man, simply drawing out the aggressive, destructive, misogynist urges that are the common property of anyone unfortunate enough to carry a Y chromosome. Ellis aimed "up", they aimed "down", and no amount of cleverness could disguise it.

The deeper failure is that in their feminist zeal the pair forgot that even the most explicit pamphlet requires good characterisation and a coherent story. Considerable attention is lavished on production design, costume and the accompanying music, yet the feel of the 1980s barely registers. The cast is unusually strong — Witherspoon, Sevigny, Mathis, Leto — and most of it is wasted. The most egregious example is Dafoe's detective, who is given a great deal of build-up and then vanishes, without explanation, at the halfway mark. Bale himself gives few reasons to flag American Psycho as a bright spot in his career; his Bateman is so grotesquely mannered that it is hard to take him seriously either as a businessman or as a psychopathic killer. And then there is the ending, which is the worst of all possible worlds: simultaneously the most predictable, clichéd conclusion imaginable and a piece of evasion that answers none of the questions it raises, drowning us instead in pseudo-intellectual monologue. The sceptical viewer will put the confusion down to confusion in the authors' conception rather than to any deliberate challenge to a philosophy-hungry audience. The film does have a handful of genuinely bright, almost Tarantino-esque moments — Bateman's disquisitions on his fixation with such eighties pop icons as Huey Lewis & The News, Phil Collins and Whitney Houston — but they are far too brief to repair the overall impression. One leaves with the bitter thought of what Verhoeven or Tarantino might have made of the material.

Set against the rest of Ellis's screen catalogue, this failure looks less like an accident than a pattern. In my review of Less Than Zero (1987) I noted how late-eighties Hollywood, in its prissy, risk-averse way, stripped the novel of its extreme sex, its heroin, its abortions and its abused pre-teens, and turned the passive Clay into a conventional rescuer for the sake of a "Just Say No" message — yet, for all its limitations, Marek Kanievska's film remains a more coherent narrative, with a genuinely chilling James Spader and a career-best Robert Downey Jr. as the addict in free-fall. The Rules of Attraction (2002), which I rate the strongest of the bunch and which Ellis himself named his favourite adaptation, works precisely because Roger Avary's Tarantino-honed non-linearity and black humour match the nihilism of the source instead of apologising for it. The Informers (2008), which I reviewed as the weakest, is a disjointed set of vignettes with unsympathetic characters who never connect — and yet even it, under Gregor Jordan, has a sour honesty about Los Angeles that Harron's picture conspicuously lacks. The one thing all four share is that they are adaptations of Ellis; the one thing that marks American Psycho apart is that it is the only one to have achieved genuine cultural permanence — and not, emphatically, because it is good.

That permanence deserves scrutiny, because it is the crux of my argument. American Psycho endures today chiefly as a quarry for internet memes. Patrick Bateman's face, his bone-dry delivery, the business-card scene, the "impressive, very nice" cadence, the Huey Lewis exegesis, the running gag about returning videotapes — these circulate endlessly, divorced from the film that spawned them and often funnier than it. That a picture can become a fixture of popular culture while remaining a second-rate piece of filmmaking is not a paradox; it is simply evidence that virality and quality are different currencies. The memes prove the film is quotable and stylish. They do not prove it is well-made.

Nor has the passage of time been kind. Consider the sequel — or rather the thing that calls itself one. American Psycho II: All American Girl (2002), directed by Morgan J. Freeman (not that Morgan Freeman) and starring Mila Kunis as a criminology student with a body count and William Shatner as her professor, is a straight-to-video oddity so tenuously connected to its supposed predecessor that the received wisdom is that Lions Gate simply took an old, unused script, gave it a tweak and bolted the American Psycho name onto the poster. It is remembered, when at all, as a curiosity. That a film of such apparent stature should beget so forgettable a sequel is itself a comment on the thinness of the original's foundations.

And now, in 2026, comes the most damning evidence of all: the remake. Lions Gate, having evidently decided that the Harron version is not the last word, has spent the past few years developing a fresh adaptation for Luca Guadagnino, with a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns. The casting process has been a slow-motion embarrassment. Austin Butler was widely reported as the front-runner and then, seemingly, drifted away; Jacob Elordi's name was floated; and Ellis himself, on his podcast, reported that "a couple of high-profile actors, whom I can't name, have turned it down" — his diagnosis being that "they don't want to be in the shoes of Christian Bale". The script has reportedly been rewritten repeatedly in response to actors' feedback, Guadagnino's supposed delay in getting to Bateman's full psychosis is said to be a sticking point, and by the middle of the year there was open speculation that the studio might lose patience and move on without him.

Read this saga as an argument against the 2000 film and it becomes eloquent. If Harron's American Psycho were the definitive screen version, why the hunger for another? If it had got the novel right, why would Guadagnino and Burns be drafting and redrafting a take that Ellis describes as bearing no resemblance to it? The remake exists precisely because the 2000 film is widely felt — by the industry, by the author, and by a good many of us in the critical trade — to have left the job half-done: too coy about the violence, too selective about the satire, too eager to substitute a thesis of its own for the one Ellis wrote. The very difficulty of casting Bateman again is a backhanded tribute to Bale's performance, but it is no tribute at all to the film around him.

So my verdict stands, twenty-six years on, unrevised: American Psycho is an important film that is not, in the end, a good one. Important because it dragged a genuinely transgressive novel onto the screen at all, because it gave the world an icon in Bateman and a lexicon of memes, and because it opened — however clumsily — a conversation about the moral emptiness of the boom years that Ellis had already had. Not good because Harron and Turner subordinated a novel to a creed, jettisoned its Reagan-era politics, squandered a fine cast, botched the ending and left behind a confusing picture that was made both long before and long after its time. That Hollywood is now preparing to try again is the most fitting verdict of all.

RATING: 2/10

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