Reviews

A successful executive, Patrick Bateman (played by Christian Bale) is a typical Wall Street financial top dog. He likes and does all the typical things Wall Street people do: parties, drugs, living in posh apartments and so on. However, as the title suggests, Bateman has another thing he likes to do: he is a psychopathic murderer.

This satirical black comedy demonstrates some of the realities of the modern Wall Street-based society. Although it is not clear if the author of the novel intends it (not having read the novel), the story could be interpreted as a story of Wall Street executives literally getting away with murder. It may not be that the Wall Street executives are particularly "evil" people themselves, but because of their class position, the executives wield enormous amounts of power and privilege. Thus, it is very instructive when Bateman finds out that nobody wants to believe his confessions of a uber-privileged executive being a serial killer on the side. Also, the behavior of law enforcement when it confronts him is markedly different with all deference being offered to him as a mark of his exalted position and in the end, it is not clear if law enforcement would ever be interested in having justice served to him, but it is clear from one of the last scenes, where he shows his own incredulity at his lawyer laughing off his sordid confessions, that Bateman ironically realizes his own hyper-privileged position pretty much absolves him of any crimes of mass murder he may want to continue to commit.

Considering that most Hollywood movies mainly involve characters and story lines in idealistic settings where everyone is rich, wealthy, well to do, this movie was interesting insofar as it formed the real life story of the boxer "Irish" Micky Ward and showed the conditions of a lower middle class Irish household in New England and a boxer who comes from such a setting. There was another movie similar to this, released a couple of years ago, The Wrestler (2008), that showed the real conditions that are faced by some wrestlers in spite of the glamorous setting in which they are portrayed on television. It appears that some directors are beginning to see that showing the everyday conditions faced by ordinary people can be appealing to audiences. Overall, this movie had some positive points with good performances, especially by Christian Bale and its characters were well-formed, but the storyline and presentation lacked depth and one came away feeling half-disappointed with a movie that showed a lot of potential, but failed to deliver the knockout punch.

After reaching a low point in his career where he gets knocked out by a bigger boxer, Micky Ward (Mark Walhberg) receives encouragement from girlfriend, Charlene (Amy Adams) to get back on his feet and train with a new trainer since his previous trainer, Dicky (Christian Bale), is in jail. After this, the movie starts on the standard feel good, "rags-to-riches" storyline.

The movie also has one of the two main characters, Dicky, being videographed for a documentary about which he does not know what it is about. Being a crack addict, he is not even aware of being involved in such a documentary. His character is an interesting one insofar as it is a morality story about crack addiction, a rags to riches tale and an anti-hero, all mixed in one. Of course, talking about crack addiction cannot be considered simply as a morality tale as it is a major issue faced by millions of people in the United States and other countries. When Dicky gets caught by the cops and is about to be dragged away, the reaction shown by his half-brother, Micky, was a spontaneous one and this scene was a reminder of the situation faced by many ordinary people who have to deal with cops in one way or the other.

An important disappointing point about the movie were the characters of Micky's sisters, about all of whom we see nothing other than they just seem to "hang around" the house without doing anything. This seems strange as it is shown that their mother, who forms the character of the failing businesswoman, seems to be the only earning member of the household and that she earns around $20,000 for each fight that Micky takes part in. With such an income, we can conclude that it is not possible to support the seven sisters and they must be working too. We normally do not see such characters as the sisters shown in this movie in Hollywood movies. However in the movies of such directors as Ken Loach, we do find characters of real working women and the conditions faced by them. Though it is not mainly about them, this movie does not attempt to portray them in a good light at all, but instead they are shown mainly to be bellicose, lazy "hangers on".

After much training and encouragement from his new trainer and girlfriend, Micky goes on to win his fight with a Mexican boxer. Micky then is given an opportunity for a title fight, which he accepts. In the title fight, which takes place in London, we see that his opponent is a British boxer. In many Hollywood movies, the character of the villain is played by someone with a (many a time, faux-) British accent and we knew from the start of the fight that his opponent had to lose the fight since he had a British accent. Thus, the movie forms a standard rags to riches tale which forms one of the staple types of movies that roll out of Hollywood ever so often.