Cold and methodical thriller that goes on too long

Rating: 6/10 (22 October 2017)

Not having read the book, I experienced 'Gone Girl' cold. And that's pretty much how it left me come the end – cold. Perhaps that was the point but I suspect the ambitions of the film were aiming higher than simply provoking indifference. David Fincher has always been an expressive visual artist, painting sumptuous and richly textured images for us to be enveloped by, but what many of his film experiences lack is heart.
Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike give it a good go though, playing a rather unlikable pair that become even more unlikable as the story unfolds. Affleck plays it nice but icy and Pike plays tightly coiled angst, and their relationship retains the interest namely because of the machinations and turns of the plot. It's a good mystery that takes its time to simmer before boiling over a little too much in the final third but it has a couple of devilishly good twists that flip the narrative on its head and play with your perceptions/expectations in extremely interesting ways.
However, take away Fincher's visual craftsmanship and you're left with a rather stretched and staggered plot that wobbles under the weight of its own running time. Why so long? I suspect the only real answer to that question is – Gillian Flynn, who adapted her own book and was perhaps a tad overly precious in translating her material to the screen. The result is a bum-numbing 150 mins for a story that only really deserves approximately 110-120 max. This is a thriller after all, not a socio-political epic. Its ending is also so contrived and inexplicable it fails to deliver the sucker punch promised from its first two acts - an ending which I imagine played much better in the book.
'Gone Girl' has aspirations of something greater, asking to be taken seriously as an exploration on the nature of the media, celebrity and gender politics but it never really rises above the pot-boiler intrigue of its original source material.