Gone Girl Review Part 1
Good but not as great as everyone else seems to be going on about.
mi·sog·y·ny (məˈsäjənē) noun – dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.
mi·sog·a·my (məˈsäɡəmē) noun – the hatred of marriage.
I’m starting my review with these two definitions due to the fact that if you have ever been on the fence about being either a misogynist or misogamist this film will push you over into the miso yard. If you have ever had a reason to distrust a woman, your wife, or the idea of marriage but are trying to get over it do not see this film. You will walk out seriously distrusting your wife, your mother, your female friends and relatives, the girl who serves you coffee at Starbucks, and any mammal lacking a Y chromosome (and possibly certain female birds and reptiles).
Not to say it’s a bad movie. It’s actually quite good. Compelling story, fun twists, great characters, excellent acting, very good pacing, and overall a truly flowing story. It even has a couple of very positive female characters in the sister and the cop. It is by David Fincher, director of my all time favorite film Fight Club and as such I would expect it to be at the very least masterful and it is. 
Of course the only female character in Fight Club is a sex crazed borderline personality ball busting kleptomaniac so it seems clear that Mr. Fincher has never planned on building his career through the uplifting of the female stereotype. (I did feel the need to show a better female stereotype so I pulled this image from the Wonder Woman t shirt category)
However to see a positive role model male or female is not why you go see a David Fincher film. He is the master of the flawed protagonist and this film definitely falls into that slot. Therefore it is not the issue I have with the film. The problem I can’t seem to get past is the fact that at one point about 3/4 of the way through the 149 minutes of the film a scene that was supposed to be both horrific and pivotal had most of the audience (including myself) laughing uproariously and the suspension of disbelief, which had been hovering nicely at the 12-14 ft mark, shot up to the upper stratosphere and left us all gasping for oxygen. The last 1/4 of the film stopped being a gritty and realistic crime drama and turned into a fantasy with comedic overtones that were really hard to take seriously.
I will be dropping spoilers shortly and will most definitely give you warnings ahead of time but for a minute I want to talk about plot holes. A plot hole is like a pot hole; some are bigger than others and some streets might have one or two or be covered with them like a teenager with acne. Sometimes you can drive past them or even swerve to avoid one that you see coming. Sometimes they are small enough that you drive right over them with just a little bump and sometimes there are so many packed together that the street is more pot hole then asphalt and you can move along at a slow pace with a steady vibration through your seat.
Sometimes, however, you can be driving along a perfectly smooth street with no sign of anything and all of a sudden hit a gigantic pot hole that bottoms out your car and bends your axle, leaving you driving along listening to the sound of your tire rub against the side of your wheel well. That’s what happened for me. Smooth ride for almost two hours and then bang! Gigantic plot hole (see what I did there?).
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Gone Girl Review Part 2
SPOILER ALERT (if you want to miss them skip ahead to Part 3) Plot holes aside (I actually spotted two) the movie is brilliant from a technical point of view and the first half will draw you in like a tiger pit baited with bacon. The first half is the gritty crime drama that has everyone doing things as smart as possible and are dealing with a near criminal genius. The husband manages to make some boneheaded mistakes but it’s the same kind of mistakes anyone would make in a difficult circumstances. The wife has her dark plot going (that’s the spoiler. I hope you headed my warning) and the lady cop is super smart and doesn’t miss anything. In fact during the set up and dark reveal the plot is nigh flawless and intriguing.
Then the wife starts making some boneheaded mistakes starting with making friends with white trash losers. Her carefully constructed plot unravels and she has to improvise. She makes a huge raft of errors (this is where that one big and one sort of big plot hole crops up) but somehow everyone else gets stupider. The female cop, who until then was hard driven to find the truth and a Sherlockian genius in spotting clues, turns stupid and helpless. The husband, who given the same set of circumstances any normal human would have immediately denounced his wife and run screaming into the night rather than spend ten minutes alone with her, bites his tongue long enough for her to implement her next dark plot. The film transforms into a cool innovative movie with amazing potential to another lazy Hollywood script counting on deus ex machina and a complete disregard for character motivation to move the plot along.
What were the two big plot holes I spotted? Well, we are well into the spoiler zone so I assume you are OK with me dropping them. So the wife calls up her old high school boyfriend Doogie Howser (Niel Patrick Harris but his character name is Dezi) in order to have some resources and eventually graphically cuts his throat 
(this is the pivotal scene that had the whole audience laughing ant the exact moment that the film turned into a dark comedy. The Halloween image I pulled from the horror movie t shirt collection), claiming he kidnapped her the day she disappeared and kept her as a sex slave and rape victim. However she meets up with him weeks after her disappearance in a casino (well known for video cameras). So the police made no effort to track Doogies movements? She later uses the cameras at his lake shore mansion to make it look like he raped her but there would also have been footage of her arriving happily with him weeks after her supposed disappearance. A couple hours worth of police work would have uncovered that but no one seemed interesting in investigating the death of a wealthy person with no prior record, especially when she flubbed badly in her interrogation.
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Gone Girl Review Part 3
In spite of those issues the film was definitely several steps above the usual dross foisted upon us by Hollywood, most of whom seem to think we are mouth breathing cow people who are content to chew on whatever cud they send our way. Here is a brief, spoiler free recap:
Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is a cruddy husband who comes home to find his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) missing under suspicious circumstances. She is a minor celebrity and a media storm rapidly builds around her disappearance. A tough police investigator (Kim Dickens) leads the investigation and as it progresses suspicion shifts towards Nick and his sister Margo (Carrie Coon). Plot points and twists are revealed and things get freaky as they often do in David Fincher movies.
So worth seeing? Absolutely yes, if only to help educate the rest of Hollywood as to what we the American audiences really want. Story was good for the bulk of the film, acting was great (especially Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck. I also really liked Tyler Perry), camera and film work extremely well done, pacing kind of brilliant in the sense that Mr. Fincher wanted to build a story rather than just present one, and overall a great movie going experience. 
I just don’t think it’s worthy of the tongue bath adulation that most people seem desperate to lather it with. It’s a decent flick swimming in a sea of mediocrity. It’s not the second coming of the Godfather with a script written on paper pulped from a piece of the True Cross (Godfather image courtesy of the movie t shirt category). Go see it and if you can turn off some of your higher brain functions you will love it. Personally I think it would be a better movie if you actually left before it takes it’s left turn into Mundania. At 149 minutes you could cut out 25 minutes early and still feel like you got a quality movie experience.
4 out of 5 Phasers.
The Infamous Dave Inman
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