What a terrible lump of trash. I am baffled by the good reviews.

Rating: 2/10 (7 October 2014)

I really cannot figure out why this movie is so highly reviewed. Everything it sells itself as is a lie. For starters, it is portrayed as this suspenseful thriller where there are constant twists and turns and you never really know what is truly happening. Well, that is a total lie. There is no suspense, there are no serious or intelligent twists, just a litany of idiotic contrived absurdities.
Spoilers below:
You clearly see what is happening in very beginning with Nick (Ben Affleck) and you pretty much know he did not kill his wife 30 minutes in. Your initial sense is that she is not dead and he did not kill her, and you are right. There are no more "twists. "The "twist" is that she is insane, and the movie descends into 2 more hours of ever increasing idiocy and farcical garbage. Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes off into a series of illogical and irrational behaviors, including consorting with some random trash at a trailer park, despite having faked her own death and being the subject of a massive manhunt. The story just gets more and more absurd, with more illogical stupidity and unbelievable actions by other characters, which include police getting a search warrant on a house based on an "anonymous tip," Nick and his sister being apparently the dumbest people on Earth who would not move any of the loot out of the shed before the cops find it, the police engaging in the largest manhunt ever for a missing person after about 6 hours, etc. The movie starts out decent but gets continually worse as it goes on, and just starts getting worse and worse at a faster rate as it continues.
The acting is decent to middling, with Affleck probably giving one of the better performances overall, and Tyler Perry actually being an enjoyable aside. The other characters are largely unlikeable, unbelievable or just stilted caricatures.
The last 30 minutes are, as others have noted, unbelievably ridiculous and moronic. The woman who so carefully plans out her own death with a massive amount of preplanning, somehow commits a savage crime of passion, which is a story FILLED with holes, but somehow is supposed to have gotten away with it. Also, apparently even though she plotted all along to have her husband executed, she somehow had the presence of mind to save the sperm sample, keep it, then AFTER he is exonerated and she has to alter her plans to return to him last minute after murdering someone else, has the means to get it successfully implanted in herself. Oh, she is an absolute psychic apparently.
The ending is ludicrous, the characters are unrealistic farces that only someone who desperately wants to love this movie would believe, the story is overrun with artificial plot devices and deus ex machinas that serve only to advance nonsensical story lines, and the movie is in no way a twisting, changing thriller. Its just a predictable drama where the only "unexpected" things are unexpected because they are absolute nonsense that are make about as much sense as random dog running on stage and relieving itself. One of the worst movies I have seen in years.