Choke...

It was never going to be Fight Club - if anyone thought otherwise, they're morons.

It would be like expecting 2010 to be as good as or better than 2001 - it's impossible.

Regardless, Choke - the second film to see fruition from the work of Chuck Palahniuk (whose other works are seemingly almost all lined up for movie development at varying stages) - is rather enjoyable, especially due to Sam Rockwell in the lead role.

Choke could have done with a longer running time, a mere 90 minutes or so simply isn't enough to squeeze all the plot threads into an understandable state - side plots are therefore relegated to lip service and not a lot more, while the main drive of the plot (all to do with, of course, Rockwell's Mancini - who may or may not be the son of Jesus). Still though, despite losing a variety of extraneous elements that work better in the book (or perhaps if it was done by the likes of David Fincher), it's fantastic to finally see a new based-on-Palahniuk movie out there, after all it's been almost a decade since Fincher's Fight Club thrust onto the silver screen, with such balls and determination of vision that you do think - no wonder it's taken so long for Choke to get made.

Or indeed any Palahniuk book for that matter - apparently Survivor was in the running after Fight Club did well, but 9/11 firmly stuffed the script into a drawer ... what with it being about a guy delivering his final tell-all autobiography into the flight recorder of an passenger aircraft he's hijacked. Still though - it was a bloody good book.

Hopefully we'll see more Palahniuk adaptations with as much dedication to the source material as we've so far been blessed with ... even if Choke doesn't live up to the lofty standards set by Fight Club, it's still a thoroughly enjoyable film - it isn't a remake, it's not some limp-arsed PG-13 adaptation, Sam Rockwell is awesome in the lead role, and it's an actually interesting story. It's just a shame they didn't flesh it out to a full two hours, which it sorely needed in my view - just to flesh out everything going on in the background, and indeed make a slightly bigger deal of the titular scam.