Patrick Bateman is handsome, well educated and intelligent. He is twenty-seven and living his own American dream. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. At night he descends into madness, as he experiments with fear and violence.
Reception
American Psycho debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, where it polarized audiences and critics; some showered the film with praise, others with scorn. Upon its theatrical release, however, the film received positive reviews in crucial publications, including The New York Times which called it a “mean and lean horror comedy classic”. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and praised Christian Bale’s performance as being “heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability; there is no instinct for self-preservation here, and that is one mark of a good actor”. In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “The difficult truth is that the more viewers can model themselves after protagonist Bateman, the more they can distance themselves from the human reality of the slick violence that fills the screen and take it all as some kind of a cool joke, the more they are likely to enjoy this stillborn, pointless piece of work”. Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “But after an hour of dissecting the ’80s culture of materialism, narcissism and greed, the movie begins to repeat itself. It becomes more grisly and surreal, but not more interesting”. In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “If anything, Bale is too knowing. He eagerly works within the constraints of the quotation marks Harron puts around his performance”.
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