Do not get the hatred at all

[deleted]

At all? You don't get the hatred AT ALL??

Listen, I'm an incredibly fair critic. I rarely find a film to be utterly un-redeemable. But wow, this one made me seriously question my rule to never give up on a film until the end. It was barely over an hour and a half long and it was unbearable. Some films suffer from missing an Act 3. This film didn't have any acts at all. There's nothing even remotely resembling narrative storytelling in the entire film. In the first act of a story, you need to establish some sort of question for the audience like some concrete goal the character or characters are seeking. And the story is supposed to be about their journey to either achieve or fail to achieve that goal. This is storytelling 101 stuff, the absolute bare minimum one should expect in a script. It's something that even Transformers II managed to get right and yet it eluded Bret Easton Ellis. How did this script even get green-lit? Bribery? Blackmail? This is just a collection of incredibly cliched scenes involving an oppressively large cast of characters that no person could possibly care about at all who inexplicably have constant casual sex with beautiful female-looking objects devoid of any humanness.

SPOILER ALERT!

...


SPOILER OVER.

Nothing happens in this movie. Absolutely nothing. Characters don't even have personalities, let alone grow by the end of the story.

And it'd be one thing to plagiarize the work of others but this film is Ellis plagiarizing Ellis. Not only is this riddled with bad movie cliches but it features far too many elements that are identifiable with his other work: rich, privileged, and disaffected youths and adults in 80's California who just try to look cool all the time with their dark shades and their hair slicked back while having constant 3-ways and doing blow as well as listening to 80's pop music in every other scene because the filmmakers couldn't think of any other means of conveying to the audience that this takes place in the 1980s and for some unknown reason, they felt this was really, really, really important to the story, so much so that they needed to remind the audience every 2 seconds...even though this is not important to the plot in any way.

I've never read Ellis but this is the third film I've seen adapted from his work. Does he just have one story and is just rewriting it over and over again? American Psycho was a great movie. And Rules of Attraction was two decent movies clumsily smashed together. This was just pointless. The only positive thing I can think to say about it is that if Ellis only has one story in him, at least American Psycho was good, whereas Todd Solonz only has one movie in him...and it sucks.