Where has David Fincher's talent gone....?

Rating: 4/10 (10 November 2014)

Gone Girl is a well-crafted movie, well-shot, well-played, and... and I guess that's it. It's also quite long, rather dull despite its pretense to be a thriller. All of it is, in the end, quite hackneyed - all the characters are stereotypes rather than actual people, and it's hard to care of way or another what's going to happen next. The fault lies mainly with the scenario (I haven't read the novel the movie is adapted from). The whole story is supposed to be about ambiguity: whose fault is it when a marriage spiral downwards? Are we dealing with a disappearance, a murder, or something else? Can a normal-looking person be evil? This is the type of stories Patricia Highsmith, amongst others, made a living out of: just think of "The talented Mr. Ripley". But Gone Girl is just flat: the problem is not so much that the two main characters are not likable - they are much worse: they are not believable. And most secondary parts: family, police, media... are also caricatures, something created to fit the story purposes rather than how actual people behave in actual life. This is the stuff that makes acceptable TV shows on rainy evenings. It's not good enough when you sit for two hours and a half in a movie theater.