AMERICAN PSYCHO

AMERICAN PSYCHO

Directed by Mary Harron. Starring Christian Bale, Wilem Dafoe, Chloe Sevigny

Though hardly the modern-day Taxi Driver it aspires to be, Mary Harron's overdue adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 spinechiller is one of the most outrageously enjoyable serial-killer movies in recent memory.

It's determinedly offensive, with buckets of bloodletting and a nasty air of cool detachment, but American Psycho's knockout combination of creepy atmospherics and savage black humour lifts it miles above the genre standard.

As you may be aware from the novel, anti-hero Patrick Bateman is a stunningly loathsome 27-year old Wall Street broker with obscene reserves of finance and a gigantic appetite for drugs, pornography and prostitutes. He's brought to life brilliantly here by a career-high performance from Christian Bale, who looks and behaves like the living definition of vacuous yuppiedom, while allowing just the right measure of repressed psychosis to simmer.

While it's obvious from the outset that something is not quite right with this guy, the early stages only vaguely hint at the true depths of his depravity. But the film's most satifying feature is its withering depiction of modern-day consumerist attitudes, drawing an ugly parallel between rampant money-chasing and murderous cannibalism: the protagonist here wears all the 'right' designer labels, takes limos everywhere, snorts vast mountains of coke and eats in all the 'right' restauarants, thus rendering him immune from suspicion until the apocalyptic finale.

And in spite of the grim subject mater, Bale's performance itself is rarely less than hilarious: whether admiring his own prowess in front of a mirror during sex, or waxing lyrical on the MOR genius of Huey Lewis and Phil Collins during bloody butchery, he comes off throughout as the most perversely compelling villain of his kind since, Kevin Spacey in Se7en.

Amoral and unpleasant, this isn't exactly prescibed for devotees of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but on its own merits, it's one almighty beast, and not to be missed by anyone with the requisite strength of stomach.