Our tour guide is Bateman himself, a white-collar serial killer who flies into a panic when a colleague produces a business card with better lettering than his own but is curiously unruffled when he must carve up his latest victim with a chain saw. Harron (“I Shot Andy Warhol”), who adapted the book with Guinevere Turner, is smart to tone down the book’s violence and play up the dark humor. Her stylish movie has the sleek, chilly design of those minimalist offices favored by the masters of the universe. Bale plays the blankly beautiful Bateman with just the right tone of vapid menace. 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. Conceptually, this savage cartoon ends up as trapped in surfaces as its shallow antihero: it’s all dressed up with nowhere to go.
American PsychoLions Gate Opens April 14
