Lifetime movie with a big budget

Rating: 4/10 (8 October 2014)

Gone Girl is a mixed bag of good and bad. It features some fine performances and a mildly interesting plot but has some weak casting and clichéd character archetypes. It is definitely entertaining, but ultimately unconvincing in its plot. The acting is generally good but hardly perfect, and the movie is longer than it needs to be. This meandering movie features a frustratingly ambiguous ending that feels like a cop out.
In terms of acting, Ben Affleck and his sister are both very good, as is the lead detective. Various supporting actors cast as members of the sleazy mass media and Tyler Perry as Affleck's attorney are also fine. However, Amy, the "gone girl" is far less convincing, and I found Neil Patrick Harris' character Desi to be artlessly stilted. The worst casting was the white trash couple who relieved Amy of her travelling funds; conceptually they came off as a low-rent rip-off of Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis' characters from Kalifornia-utterly unoriginal. Amy's parents were annoying, in part by design no doubt, and again the casting felt lazy and obvious.
The plot holes were massive in this movie, far too much suspension of belief was required of the audience. Whether it was the faux rape in Amy's past, the faux pregnancy and its supposed legitimacy on the basis of a contrived urine test or all that time Amy spent at Desi's lake house that would have shown her to be moving about of her free will and completely contradicted her one staged scene she got on camera where she was supposedly injured by Desi, I wasn't buying any of it. I am not sure if this was handled more adeptly in the book or not (haven't read it and not likely given the author wrote the screenplay I doubt it) but I sure hope so or the reading public that made this book a hit has some explaining to do.
Overall, there was a Lifetime movie with a big budget feel and unrealized artistic aspirations to Gone Girl. The movie's attempts at being philosophical (people in a marriage being someone they're not and all that) rang hollow and phony, again I hope these were better handled in the book. Having written this review, I am trying to reflect what was good about it, and apart from a few strong performances and decent production values I am having some trouble. I give it 4/10 stars on the basis of some solid acting and its fair share of semi-mindless entertainment value, but there are far too many negatives to consider this fine cinema or a must-see movie.