Gone Girl

Gone Girl is a terrific movie, everything the book and its fans deserve.

Twisty pulp entertainment at its highest level.

Gone Girl is a rare movie: a delicious thriller that provides plenty of titillation and gruesome pleasure while offering a dollop of social commentary. It's smart, twisted, bloody, and almost guaranteed to satisfy anyone with a penchant for the macabre.

Like a film noir siren Gone Girl is beautiful, sexy, and fascinatingly mean — a nasty but estimable piece of work.

Ultimately what makes Gone Girl so watchable is the three-headed monster of Fincher, Pike and Affleck. The director bathes the B-movie scenario in the queasy-green hues of a morgue, while Affleck flashes his million-dollar smile like a dime-store Dracula and the beautifully inscrutable Pike absorbs the light like a wax mannequin. If it’s true that Nick and Amy were made for each other, they were made in a fiendish lab.

At its strongest, Gone Girl plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage, one that has disintegrated partly because of spiraling downward mobility and lost privilege. Yet, as sometimes happens in Mr. Fincher’s work, dread descends like winter shadows, darkening the movie’s tone and visuals until it’s snuffed out all the light, air and nuance.

There's a comic streak to the film that suggests David Fincher may understand the material as trash, but it's the kind of affectation that only reinforces, rather than dulls, its insults.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I enjoyed the first three quarters or so. The script managed to hold my interest and engage my brain (slightly). At around the half way point the story begins to unravel into what is an entirely unsatisfying conclusion. It echoes Fincher's previous outing, The Game, far too closely. Could have been much better.

I went into this movie with high expectations. That was a bad idea. Don't get me wrong, the performances and technical aspects are incredible. Gone Girl suffers from a terrible screenplay, but a lot of it is blurred by the phenomenal direction. Even with a master at the wheel, though, Gone Girl just doesn't stand for anything relevant, important, or even worth watching.

Bad movie. The story is really bad, visual is bad, and the voice is also bad

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]