Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

Rating: 2/10 (2 January 2015)

There are what some will call spoilers contained herein, although I consider it next to impossible to spoil this roadkill turkey.
They had all the advantages. Money, good actors. Ben Affleck being slightly less wooden than usual. Suspense. A good musical score. And still, they made a turkey.
First, in any good whodunit, you need to be emotionally invested in the hero, even if it turns out "hedoneit." I couldn't get behind Affleck, no matter how hard I tried. He exudes no warmth and generally seems to be such a self- absorbed slime-ball, it's really hard to care if he gets framed for a crime.
His wife is portrayed as a closet self-absorbed sociopath. After planning a meticulous frame for Affleck, she plans on killing herself, one thing a person like she is would never do. But then, she changes her mind at almost the last moment and decides to live on. This, from a woman who has been living for her master plan for months. Totally unbelievable.
Finally, her plan is on the cusp of succeeding. What happens? This woman, who can come up with a detailed, flawless plan to get hubby blamed for her nonexistent murder, and who later proves she is as capable of murder as a black widow spider, herself, allows all her money to get stolen by two rednecks with the combined IQ of a pint of potato salad. And does nothing to retaliate.
She is then forced to go to her first boyfriend for help, after spurning him for years following false claims about him, too. He softly, gently, abducts and virtually imprisons her. Suddenly, we have a totally new bad movie. As if the first one wasn't bad enough.
Then she runs him through the vegomatic (it slices, it dices) and it becomes a THIRD bad movie, a Slasher movie, with enough gore to satisfy Quentin Tarantino. By this point, I was looking hopefully at my watch, but the movie runs too long, anyway. It takes a long time to roll three bad movies into one.
I haven't touched on all the plot holes. I figure others have done well enough by them.
The acting was pretty good, it was the story and script that I consider awful. I can only explain the high rating by guessing Affleck or the studio have a large staff. Or perhaps "wrasslin" and American Bachelor Idol Survivor wasn't on that week, and people desperate for entertainment who had never seen a proper mystery movie chose to rate this one.
It's pretty much out of the theaters. If you really insist on wasting this much of your life, wait until it show up on cable.
Or, better yet, rent "Laura" or "The Maltese Falcon."