Gone Numb

Rating: 4/10 (11 December 2014)

Many of Shakespeare's plays are two and a half hours long. Some of the really great classics: Richard II, Macbeth and others that due to the complexity of character, action and language have provided audiences with psychological insight and the pure artistry of English in full flow.
Then there is Gone Girl, of similar length and yet; it's capacity overwhelms its creators, it's ambitions are smug and most certainly self-satisfied. It is a long arduous, monotonous endurance of platitudes which are flecked with motifs which shimmer on the vapidness of contemporary life, yet are themselves of such shiny magazine superficiality they condemn the authors of the same mediocrity.
It is over an hour before really anything of substance occurs; it breaches the protocols of the genre and taxes the humor of the viewer who are left with the wooden-faced Affleck to carry the story, occasionally interspersed with the off-screen wife.
Meanwhile we are fed clichés and stereotypes on modern media, modern marriage, the asymmetry of male and female relationships all delivered with the gusto of the new college student who has just learned of these elements in adult life.
The entire masquerade doggedly plugs on with the stamina of oxen ploughing a field. The characters do not change, the language in the script is common and forgettable, the pacing is akin to a stopped clock and when the final credits roll, it is almost impossible not to give up praise that time is still moving and that the potential for real life may still be possible.
The easiest way to make this work is cut at least fifty minutes and it becomes, what is really is: not a very original domestic thriller and not very memorable. Making it long does not make it excellent, not when the basic material is so thin.