Farcical studio cliché too clever for its own good

Rating: 1/10 (3 January 2015)

About a quarter way into this movie, I was hooked, won over by the cleverness of the script and its execution. The increasingly tense story of a husband whose wife suddenly disappears is skilfully intercut with scenes of the couple's relationship, from the first throes of love, to the falterings that hint at something darker. The acting and direction promised to deliver a polished thriller, with deeper social commentary on the media and its corruption of the judicial process.
This looked like big-budget, star-laden Hollywood storytelling at its best, so well executed you could almost overlook the slightly ludicrous proposition that police would immediately launch a manhunt and press conference for what looked like a routine missing person report. This was clumsily explained with 'there has been a lot of crime lately', a lame plot contrivance among many that would increasingly litter the movie.
Gone Girl never lived up to its promise and quickly descended from smart thriller to predictable whodunit, with a twist, of course, because all clichéd whodunits have to have a twist. This movie, however, did the old twist on a twist, with another twist  or two. I gave up counting, gave up on this complete inanity after it became more and more ridiculous, less and less believable, with a host of silly plot flaws that destroyed the suspense and degenerated to a laughable conclusion.
All of that money, all of those people who worked on this movie, and they couldn't put together a decent believable story? Kind of sums up the dysfunction of studio formula: all show no substance, all artifice no art. Just another star vehicle with a lame story.
So I'm giving it one star. Those who can suspend all disbelief and like slick-looking cliché may think me harsh, but flawed rubbish like this is a waste of millions that could have been spent so much better elsewhere. And someone has to counter all those fake 10/10 reviews and massive studio promotion budgets that pump up trite fluff like this.