"Body Heat" + "Misery" = Meh

Rating: 4/10 (1 March 2015)

This movie wanted it all: the plot where the insane woman frames her husband for murdering her (she framed the lover for her husband's murder in "Body Heat," but same idea), and the plot where the insane woman keeps her husband in the house against his will (it was a crazed fan and a famous writer in "Misery," but same idea). Instead, the sum of the parts is much less than the individual parts.
I have not read the book, and so I must hope that its logic is constructed above the five-year-old-level. That's certainly not the case for this film. Its first two overly long acts work pretty well, gradually revealing the husband's sleazy behavior and downfall to (undeserved) murder suspect in act I, and then the wife's adventures on the lam, when she ironically gets fleeced by low-lifes in act II.
In the third overly long act, the screenwriters have written themselves into a ridiculous corner: Accused of his wife's murder, hated by her parents, his adultery exposed on TV, with plenty of circumstantial evidence that she is a murderous psychopath and the police investigator on his side now, hubby Ben Affleck has nothing whatsoever to lose by dumping her. Au contraire, his life may be on the line. Yet he plays along with his insane wife's 'I'm coming home' ploy! He's motivated by an implausible explanation of how she owns his bar and might be pregnant with his child - the latter a situation that only arose in the first place because he took her back in! We have investigators who let her back to her home within a few hours of her mysterious reappearance, still drenched in her dead captor's (really: her dead victim's) blood, no need to investigate! There's plenty of additional silliness, but this shall suffice.
To make a long story short: in mindless action movies, I wholeheartedly forgive plot holes. In a thriller, not. The last 45 minutes of this film are some of the silliest nonsense I have seen on the screen in a long time. Go see "Body Heat" (1981) instead for a well done version of the first part of this movie, and then see "Misery," with an unforgettable performance by Kathy Bates, for a well done version of the last part of this movie.
4/10 for strong acting by Rosamund Pike, who plays the girl turned into a nut job by her parents because they marketed her childhood as a children's book. Affleck also did a solid job, and an excellent supporting cast is at hand. If only they had gotten screenwriters of the same caliber on board, it could have been a 7: I am assuming the novel, with more space to explain and finesse the plot, does not descend into a pile of nonsense at the end.