Dreadful

Rating: 2/10 (14 December 2014)

This is a terrible film. There are many, many things wrong with it - preposterous plot, miscast lead actress, excessive running time, excruciating soundtrack, etc. - but overall the key flaw, present from the first scene, is that it never manages to cross the line between feeling like we're watching some actors (not to mention a director) working, and being immersed in a story. It just doesn't work.
We're clearly supposed to view this as a big zeitgeist capturing movie,what with all the 'trial by media' shenanigans; but this is neither new nor innovatively handled: in the end it amounts to nothing more than sensationalist TV hosts and vans on the lawn.
As a thriller, it doesn't work either. We don't care about the characters, and the plot is so ridiculous it overwhelms everything else. OK, we don't expect total plausibility - look at Hitchcock - but there has to be a limit.
Finally, the ending is, if anything, even worse than the book, which, by the way, has been inexplicably well reviewed: it is trash literature.
The two star, rather than one star rating, is for Kim Dickens, the only good thing in the film.
Avoid this junk at all costs.