Gone

The film's pieces don't always fit together, but even in isolation, some of those pieces are well worth watching.

Which stinks worse? The absurdly large pile of red herrings Gone amasses? Or the film's sub-Scooby Doo conclusion?

A low-pulse thriller that evaporates from memory with the last credit.

There's no thrill in Gone because you can see every surprise coming. It lies there flapping like a dying fish. Skip it.

Gone is also your hard-earned money if you buy a ticket to this slack piece of work, a movie that makes "Murder on the Orient Express" feel like "The Silence of the Lambs" by comparison.

A thriller so fixated on red herrings that viewers may stop caring if anyone's really in danger, Gone is diverting but unlikely to linger long in theaters.

The one cop (Bentley) who buys Jill's story looks like the most likely suspect (or at least the most likely red herring) - and then he vanishes for the entire third act to, supposedly, make his mother some soup. Wait, what?

This looked good in the ads but we missed it opening weekend. Almost skipped it after reading reviews but decided to go anyway and were pleasantly surprised. Sure there where some things that were a stretch of reality, but not enough to kill the creepy, something bad is about to happen to her vibe. Definitely more entertaining than many of the movies getting better reviews, but then what else is new? Much more engaging than the well reviewed bad cop movie we saw last week and that seems to be a favorite with the critics.

It’s a film that I believe is trying to be too clever for its own good; there are too many coincidences and blind alleys. On the performance front, I thought Amanda Seyfried did a good job but nobody else really stood out. Sadly I found it really hard to sympathise with her character because the threat appears to be in her head for much of the film. There’s sadly not much else I can say about it; I’ve maybe been a little generous with the score, but Portland did look good on the screen and the cinematography was pretty good over all. Not one I’ll be watching again but I’m glad I saw it for Seyfried’s performance if nothing else. SteelMonster’s verdict: NOT RECOMMENDED My score: 5.7/10

Amanda Seyfried is a fantastic young actress and easily one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood but neither her talent nor her remarkable good looks could save this film. The story had potential but too many of the supporting cast were weak in terms of acting and character depth and the writing was very lazy. A lot of the tense moments were a result of mediocre decision making by the protagonist rather than by circumstance so it felt annoying rather than nerve-wracking. The conclusion of the movie also felt very rushed and anticlimactic. Overall, Seyfried does a good job but can't save the movie.

The movie didn't always make sense. In the end it was a good movie but it didn't fit together. The psychotic serial killer and the messed up good girl put a weird twist on things. Unfortunately, where excitement should have been it was nothing but a boring movie that we had to force ourselves to finish.

This late February release has the outer shell of The Silence of the Lambs; serial killer abducts a woman, throws her into the ground, and it's up to Clarice Starling (called Jill here) to rescue her before it's too late. But gone are the memorable characters and unforgettable performances, gone are the psychological insights and sexual undercurrent, and gone are the atmosphere of evil and looming menace. At least they got the title right. Jill's methodology holds the film's interest. She knows that people rarely believe her when she tells the truth about the abduction of herself or her sister, so she tells them lies they'll believe instead, whatever sob story it takes to get information out of her mark. She's not a legendary hacker or deductive sleuth; she's a pathological liar in search of the truth. While how it gets there holds interest, the story of Gone arrives at familiar beats; a betrayal as the film goes into the final stretch (from a character we haven't met yet), a high-speed car chase heralds the climax. The film runs on borrowed parts from better films (Silence of the Lambs) and lesser films (Kiss the Girls), and suffers from a lack of invention. Without proper setup, the film does not payoff to what little it builds up to, leaving a feeling of wanting more from 90 minute's investment.