Would it have been too much to ask for a thriller that leaves its protagonist's paranoid delusions flailing and unfettered, as opposed to splinding them into an elaborate architecture of explanation? (Buzzers to your immediate right, folks). Like father like son, director Brad Anderson seems to have willed himself into amnesia, only the jury's out on where slaying our sense of intelligence falls in relation to slaying our children; all he manages to offer up in defense is one fat (no, not phat) call-out to the forefathers of Gen-Y disaffection.

Anyway, didn't all this incredibly effervescent fake-doppelganger bullshit go out with Fincher? Though as long as kids are still buying the t-shirts, I guess people like Anderson are going to keep reeling 'em in and fattening 'em up. It's become emblematic of a kind of (pop-)cultural paucity wherein a movie can be cut-and-pasted together from various bits purely due to their individual associative weight. What stops this from turning into a totally throwaway portrayal of a glammed-up loser though, is Bale's almost unprecedented dieting feat; he manages to become an unnervingly real embodiment of the industrial decay that wreathes his surroundings, at the same time exploiting over and over again that peculiar desire of mine to want to feed anyone thinner than I am. He then spends a large portion of the film running around like a shell-shocked battery hen through a slick, convulsive hellhole; and while the visual scheme is too leaden to really do much aside from sit there and act ugly, like a dying dachshund, Anderson makes up for it by repeatedly mining an appreciated vein of working class angst and alienation. Unfortunately, none of that lasts too long before Anderson pops another swizzle stick and decides that what this thing needs is some more stupid crazy shit, so if that's your bag, then by all means help yourself. Me? I think I have stomach ache.—David Levinson

» Brad Anderson | Spain | 2004