Real gone

Rating: 3/10 (11 January 2015)

Hate to burst the bubble (IMDb top 250, average mark over 8), but I just didn't get this David Fincher thriller at all. With its combination of unsavoury lead characters, jaundiced view of television reporting and fantastical plotting, I found it unengaging, unbelievable and I'm sure many more "un's" I could think of if I put my mind to it.
I'm guessing the main theme here could be the unravelling of a modern marriage in the face of the recession but no, on consideration it just seems like another study by director Fincher of a psychopath. Just what the movies need today.
Nothing is credible here, the relationship between brother and sister, the husband's casual attitude towards his wife's unexplained disappearance, his revealed-out-of-nowhere fling with one of his class students, the wife's misadventure with trailer-park trash, her jilted high-school lover-become-Howard Hughes who gets a poor reward for his admittedly somewhat possessive assistance to her at time of need (seems to me she should have gone after the two who rolled her at the caravan park rather than her ill-fated worshipper). If you're wondering how these random sounding events link together, then, even after watching the movie, so am I. It takes forever to reach a conclusive act of bloody violence which even then isn't worth the wait.
As for the acting, it was no big deal. Ben Affleck looks and acts like a slobbish Hugh Grant and to be honest does so with about as much depth as the Englishman. Rosamund Pike wants us to think she's a latter-day Hitchcock mystery-blonde but she can keep wanting. Almost the only things I liked about the film were Trent Raznor's atmospheric soundscapes in the background and the fluid camera-work throughout.
Otherwise, for me this was a major disappointment and demonstrated no real progress in the genre by this "name" director going back to "Se7en". The emperor's new clothes methinks.