Bateman Begins: An American Psycho

I went into this one wanting to love it, honestly. The idea is funny and creative. Unfortunately, the execution just didn’t work. There really is no coherent story here, which I know was a big task, but what resulted is essentially a collection of alternating scenes from “Batman Begins” and “American Psycho.” Each goes on so long you forget that you’re watching a special fanedit. A for effort, but F for final product.

A very interesting experience ! sometimes confusing but I still enjoyed it a lot, congratulations for the work !

This is an interesting fan edit. I saw it on a list of Must See fan edits over five years ago... and I think the fan editing has come a long way since then. This is an outlandish idea to merge three wholly unrelated Christian Bale movies and somehow try to craft a cohesive and coherent story. In that regard, it works... But its just not as fun as I was hoping it would be.

I find myself agreeing with Neglify, the Batman story beats feel disconnected, and I think it would've played much better as a 30 minute short. The joke of the premise gets a little stale after a while, especially because there is such a stark difference between the American Psycho and Batman footage.

I have to give props to the creative use of the infamous Terminator Salvation rant audio for a single line. That was the kind of fun energy that I was hoping for throughout!

Lastly, the closing monologue of American Psycho playing over the ending of The Machinist actually worked remarkably well! I want to see an entire edit that merges just those two movies and ignores Batman entirely. There's something really promising there!

Adabasi's mashup of Christian Bale movies is a lot more entertaining than I expected it to be. I approached it with the mindset that it would be funny, but in a dark way.

I was also surprised by how well the narrative works. It isn't perfect, of course, but just like American Psycho and The Machinist, some things are meant to be ambiguous. The audience gets to fill in certain details on their own, but the overall arc of Christian Bale's character seems pretty clear. Once I realized how his character transitioned from Bruce Wayne to Patrick Bateman, I couldn't stop laughing. It was great! And the transition to Trevor Reznik was uncomfortable and sad, which is what I think Adabasi was going for.

I thought it was very clever to include clips from the famous Christian Bale rant in the places that they were.

Overall, this was pretty enjoyable to watch while I suspended my disbelief and let my imagination run wild with it.
Thank you Adabasi for doing something so bold and creative.

The technical editing on this was incredible. The audio and video flowed together very well, with no sound feedback or jarring cuts in the clips to draw attention to the fact that they didn't originally go together (with one exception, which I will address below). Technologically, this was a masterpiece.

The narrative, however, I found very weak. There were such long stretches of just "American Psycho" that I didn't feel it tied in very well with the "Batman" story. The characterization also needed to be more tightly cut; Bateman's inner monologues, such as the one about his hygiene regimen, don't really fit the Bruce Wayne-going-crazy idea, and should've been trimmed down, excised, or dubbed over with music. Alfred's appearances are so sparse and scattered that it's difficult to figure out why he's there at all. I just didn't feel like I was watching one cohesive movie. I was very conscious of the fact that I was watching a blend of three.

One audio thing I feel the need to mention was the inclusion of Christian Bale's on-set freakout from "Terminator." It was not cut in very well, and was very startling. Plus, since Christian Bale speaks with his real English accent in the freakout (which neither the Bruce or Bateman characters speak with), it took a minute to even connect that voiceover screaming to the characters on the screen.

Overall, I think that the edit shows great technological prowess, but a loose grasp of story.