IMDb #146 Review: Gone Girl (2014)

Source: Wikipedia

The runaway bestselling e-book gets the Hollywood treatment, and miraculously ticks off everything I hate about mysteries.

Not that it makes the ride any less enjoyable.

A seemingly ordinary middle-class guy -- the modern reader's self-insert "failed writer working dull normal job" -- returns home to find his seemingly perfect wife vanished. Almost immediately, the delicate situation spirals into fractal overcomplexity. A half-baked secret diary. A shed of unwanted Internet loot. A creepy yet wealthy ex-boyfriend played by Neil Patrick Harris. Murder, staged murder, concealed murder. And a tangled mess of manipulation and pretending and domestic abuse and, how'd you guess, infidelity.

Because of the twenty-first century, the media picks up the story. It goes viral. Explodes into a publicity marathon of Hunger Games-style celebrity image management.

Finally we find out where she is, and what happened, then what really happened, and then...

Holy shitballs, this is complicated. Um. Backtrack.

It starts with a fairytale romance, between an aspiring novelist and a brilliant beautiful blonde bombshell. Whose pushy parents obtained their ludicrous wealth by publishing children's book about the idealized image of their daughter. No pressure, honey.

But apparently romance runs on money, because once the recession hits, the genre switches. Out go the kinky sex games, here comes the nagging, the provoking, the public facade.

Back to the start of this sick scavenger hunt.

All the fuss about the fickleness of public sympathy has weight, because the character sympathy swings back and forth like a drunk yo-yo. It took me too long to realize: nothing's real, nobody's sympathetic, and everything is terrible. That realization makes the experience loads better, and I could almost enjoy the terrible things happening to these awful people in their toxic relationships.

For all the nods to classic mysteries, it's just not my cup of poisoned tea. I'd forgive the absurd contrivances if they labored toward a satisfactory conclusion. But no. BUT NO.

Smash-cut to the end credits, you wait the real ending, in vain. I wanted to reach behind the screen where all these lovely idiots live and bash in their brains with the bulkiest e-reader available to the general public.

149 minutes.