Gone Girl

Gone Girl (2014)

88% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 280 reviews)

Runtime: 149 minutes

Directed by: David Fincher

Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Carrie Coon

From: 20th Century Fox/Regency

Here is another opinion many won't agree with, and unfortunately it's another 2014 film many like and I do not understand the near-universal praise at all. I explain why I hated this movie below in my Letterboxd review. I think it's best I take a one night break from watching movies so I'll be back Thursday night.

I know already most people will strongly disagree with me here, or at least be aghast at seeing such a rating attached to this; I imagine some think I am a contrarian or even a troll because this is yet another 2014 movie I've seen which is beloved by what seems like the vast majority but I just don't comprehend it. I will try to explain why I would rate a movie so low when I see 4 star or higher ratings for it everywhere on this site.

I'll admit right away the sacrilegious statement that I've never really been a fan of Fincher. I won't break down what I have and haven't seen of his, and all that was long before I joined this site but I'll just say that I saw Fight Club soon after it came out on disc (so it's not like this is an opinion of it years after the fact) and thought it was absolutely insufferable.

What made me see this was all the hype and I do enjoy watching true life mystery shows on TV such as Dateline NBC, 48 Hours, the program on the Investigation Discovery channel or what used to be on the former Court TV before that channel did a 180 and became atrocious mindless garbage. A story about how a wife disappears and the husband is the subject (understandable as in those cases it's typically someone they knew) sounded interesting to me, so I somehow managed to stay almost entirely spoiler-free until I watched it last night.

I won't even get into the whole ending and whether or not this movie is misogynistic; I wouldn't think so because the female author adapted her own book but I was more offended by how ridiculous and stupid it got rather than any issues of misogyny. Christ, as I later remembered when I read it again after the fact, someone I follow also thought that the first 15 minutes or so were pretty terrible, with atrocious dialogue and a complete smug douchy unrealistic “meet cute” where you see how the two lead characters first met each other. He thought “it was done on purpose” and it might be but who knows or cares... I certainly don't! I thought it was putrid and no explanation can make it acceptable.

I'll presume the characters, dialogue, and story are just as bad and intolerable in the book. While that follower ended up liking the film in the end, I did not feel the same way at all. After that opening I still thought the dialogue was bad, I didn't like any of the other characters that came into the film (“director's hubris” seemed to be the reason why Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry had major roles here; they were fine but come on now), and that story was ludicrous and made absolute zero sense and left me pondering numerous gigantic intelligence-insulting plot holes*-and there were more than a few underdeveloped or unresolved plot threads to boot-and if others loved its daffiness, good for you; I thought it was intelligence-insulting in many ways, the inconsistent way characters acted being a big reason why. What a LONG 2 ½ hour experience this was. It was tough but I did make it to the end. I didn't even enjoy the media bashing that happened and I typically think that today's media deserves any and all criticism.

If most people love this movie and the director in general, that is OK with me. I'll be baffled by all the praise it has gotten for a crap film that just has some fine performances, Tyler Perry somehow being tolerable, and good cinematography going for it, but I will accept that this somehow is captivating to people. I will be happy avoiding Fincher's dour films and stick to watching those real life crime mysteries and enjoy the actual absurdities that can happen and not things like a bar being called THE BAR and “hospitals that take care of a blood-soaked woman and don't wash said blood off her before discharging her to go back home.” I just know my mission to create a worthy Top 10 list for the year will probably take me a few more months to create.

* I won't spoil them but if you look at the IMDb page for the film, a number of people have listed many of the illogical moments in spoiler-filled recaps.