The problem with David Fincher's Fight Club, presented on the last day of the Venice festival, is that, like so many Hollywood movies by film-makers of some pretension, it tries to have it both ways: revel in the violence and then decry it in the last reel. Fight Club is a dangerous film in this respect only if you believe that idiots will wallow in it. If you have more respect for its audiences, it is just a bit silly, rather dull and overlong at two hours and 15 minutes.

Edward Norton plays the narrator, a disillusioned young man with a gun in his mouth in the first scene, put there by Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, a man with a mission to cure the ills of modern society. The things you own, he says, end up owning you. Destroy them. Destroy everything. Then you'll be free and whole again.

Durden's methods are odd. He gets the narrator into the Fight Club, a group of seeming macho monsters who punch each other senseless until one wins and then hugs the loser to his bosom. It doesn't matter who wins as long as you fight well. But there is a twist. Tyler is really the narrator's alter ego.

Fincher presents this as a surprise but the film's philosophical trimmings are pretty obvious, as they were in the much better Seven. Fincher is a good craftsman posing as someone with something significant to say. He may even say it one day. But he doesn't in this overblown baloney.

It has a good cast. We know Norton to be an excellent actor and Pitt gives one of his more rounded portraits. Helena Bonham Carter, finally freeing herself of her period beauty image, appears as the punk who humps Tyler so thoroughly that you can hear the orgasmic moan two blocks away.

Fincher cranks up the atmosphere now and then with real elan. He is a good film-maker as far as mood goes. But just as often he seems to let the whole big city fantasy drift alarmingly.

Will it be successful? Probably, but it hardly deserves to be another Seven. It is too big for its boots and says nothing very convincing about the human predicament. It's a parable of all-encompassing nihilism that pats you on the head with a moralistic ending and expects you to go home thinking good of it. I left the cinema wondering how much more flesh could have been put on its bones with more punchlines and fewer punches.