AMID VIOLENCE OF `FIGHT CLUB,' DON'T FORGET THAT IT'S A COMEDY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

The thing to keep in mind is, laugh.

For all its assaultive style, for all its graphic brutality, for all its pretensions to incendiary transgression, ``Fight Club'' is, first and forever, a comedy. And it's at its best when the filmmakers remember that.

Conversely, the movie lags whenever director David Fincher (``Alien 3,'' ``Seven'') and screenwriter Jim Uhls, working from a punky cult novel by Chuck Palahniuk, imagine that they have serious statements to make about such weighty subjects as soul-deadening '90s consumerism, male rage or the fascistic potential of, well, human potential ideologies. But if these guys possess anything resembling insight, it lays - like that of their film's heroes - in a kind of genius for outrageous pranksterism.

Perhaps ``Fight Club's'' best overriding joke is that it's going to upset many people who'll take it more seriously than the filmmakers sporadically do. Certainly there's enough bloody battering here to reinforce the prejudices of anyone who believes that a film can be a crime against humanity. Less hysterical viewers, however repulsed they may also be, will recognize that the body count here is far lower than your average Hollywood action thriller's.

Another ironic gag built into this film that is sure to be slammed for glorifying testosterone run amok: it's really just a feature-length joke about castration complexes.

Deploying a multitude of state-of-the-art film techniques like only someone who used to make commercials for a living could, Fincher plunges us right into the fevered brain of an unnamed, unreliable Narrator. Literally. The opening credits roll against a computer-generated trip from the hypothalamus fear centers through the cortex and then out of Edward Norton's mouth, which is hosting the business end of a .45.

The trigger finger belongs to a certain Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt in the wittiest, most energetic performance of his career). Through a complicated skein of flashbacks, replays and narrative jumps, we learn how this charismatic anarchist came to be an overwhelming influence on Norton's Narrator.

But first, our everyman antihero. The Narrator has one of the more wretched jobs in the heartless capitalism pantheon: recall coordinator for an auto manufacturer. His life is flying to accident sites to determine whether a given model's defects are dangerous enough to justify a mass repair notice.

Quite understandably, our boy has trouble sleeping. But he finds the perfect sedative, oddly enough, by attending meetings of catastrophic disease support groups (his first is a get-together of testicular cancer victims). Leeching off other people's misery sends him peacefully to dreamland until he notices another tourist, Helena Bonham Carter's goth hellion Marla, muscling in on his territory. She troubles his sleep.

Fortunately - well, maybe not - the Narrator soon meets Durden, a soap entrepreneur with a live-life-on-your-own-terms creed. After his IKEA-bedecked apartment is mysteriously firebombed, the Narrator learns those terms when he moves into Durden's dilapidated grunge mansion. They include creative vandalism, self-mutilation and outlandish homoerotic teasing.

And fighting. Bare-knuckle, beaten-to-a-bloody-pulp fighting. The Narrator and Durden soon become the leaders of a secret society of men who gather for underground brawls with one another that supposedly give meaning to their emasculated, drudge-work-and-numb-purchasing lives. The boxers grow in number, and Durden consequently grows in ambition, opening Fight Club chapters nationwide and engineering a guerrilla war aganist the corporate enemy.

The Narrator becomes alarmed ... Can the enlightening experience of getting your nose broken really be misinterpreted as a call to terrorism?

And then everything changes. In a plotting gambit that makes ``The Sixth Sense's'' twist play like a ``Rocky'' climax, the third act tosses a curve that throws everything that's come before it into question. Fincher comes up with shrewd visual correlatives for this change-up, significantly restaging earlier scenes and presenting them in a jerky, stepframe mode. It's like watching a human mind trying to reboot some crashed, biological hard drive.

That's not the limit of Fincher's formal trickery here, just the most resonant example. There are portentous ghost images, an apartment tour that turns into a pixilated furniture catalog, naughty quick cuts of (naturally) disembodied genitalia and ever so much more, all fired at us to the accompaniment of a superb Dust Brothers industrial score. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, who shot Fincher's `Seven'' and ``The Game,'' and production designer Alex McDowell (``The Crow,'' ``The Matrix''), make extra sure that things look dank and shadowy with obsessive consistency.

If this all sounds a bit too studiedly hip - or, more accurately, really cool for, say, 1992 - it is. Despite the scathing humor and subversive stances ``Fight Club'' affects, it's as machine-tooled as any Hollywood product is to flatter a target audience. In this case, that audience happens to be young adult nihilists with sentimental streaks for their old Nirvana albums.

Which makes this the kind of transgressive cinema you would expect from a TV commercial director. And another one of ``Fight Club's'' sublime meta-jokes, however unintended.

The facts

The film: ``Fight Club'' (R; violence, language, nudity, sex, drug use).

The stars: Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf Aday.

Behind the scenes: Directed by David Fincher. Written by Jim Uhls, based on Chuck Palahniuk's novel. Produced by Art Linson, Cean Chaffin and Ross Grayson Bell. Released by 20th Century Fox.

Running time: Two hours, 19 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three stars

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Photo

PHOTO Edward Norton is a disgruntled worker who finds himself drawn into a violent world in ``Fight Club.''