Mary Harron's film version of Bret Easton Ellis's notorious serial killer novel is stylish but strangely mild. Christian Bale is appropriately smug and creepy as the murderous Wall Street fashionplate Patrick Bateman, and Harron's avoidance of gratuitous gore is for the best. After a crisp setup, though, the narrative shares Bateman's loss of control and growing incoherence, ultimately just stopping rather than ending. The movie's final suggestion that big Money is a more efficient and ruthless killer than the mere mortal murderer-of-the-moment Bateman, whose criminal flailing and flaying scarcely ripples its world, is intriguing, but underdone. Chloe Sevigny is good as Bateman's secretary, the movie's only feeling character, and Reese Witherspoon turns in another solid performance as the unctuous debutante. The buff glossy cipher Bateman has no real foil, though, as Harron stresses the familiar theme of the characterless conformity of 80's materialism. We see that money is murder, but don't know why or if murder matters.