One out of
Five stars
Running time:
95 mins
For the most part, Gone is entirely watchable, thanks to a better-than-the-film-deserves performance from Amanda Seyfried, but the moment the mystery starts to unravel, the entire film falls apart, to the point where you'll wonder why you bothered sticking with it so long.
What's it all about?
Directed by Heitor Dhalia, Gone stars Amanda Seyfried as Jill, a paranoid young woman who's recently been released from an institution after the authorities refused to believe her story about escaping from a serial killer two years ago. However, when her recovering alcoholic sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) disappears, Jill is convinced that the killer has returned and when the police (Daniel Sunjata and Wes Bentley) refuse to believe her, she sets out to find him herself.
Unfortunately, things quickly go from bad to worse for Jill, as the police issue an arrest warrant, believing her to be armed and delusional. Can she stay one step ahead of the police and find her sister's kidnapper before it's too late?
The Bad
Seyfried is never less than watchable and she does the best she can under the circumstances, maintaining a convincing balance, so that you're never quite sure just how crazy she is. There's also decent support from Daniel Sunjata, Sebastian Stan (as Molly's equally worried boyfriend) and Jennifer Carpenter (underused yet again as Jill's best friend), though Wes Bentley rather overdoes it as Chief Suspect Number One.
In theory, it's quite a clever idea to foreground the idea that Jill might be delusional (that information is, after all, an extremely common last-reel twist in thrillers), but in practice the film doesn't manage to do anything interesting with it and the finale is both laughable and baffling in a “Is that it? Seriously?” sort of way.
The Worse
On top of that, Gone ladles on the red herrings and the potential suspects at a dizzying rate (good rule of thumb: the killer is usually a recognisable cast member), but they quickly become so ridiculous that they're unintentionally laughable – for example, Wes Bentley's ultra-shifty cop suspiciously disappears about halfway through and we're told he's “taking some soup to his sick mother ...” only for him to turn up in the background of a later scene, having, presumably, done exactly that. This strongly suggests that the ending was hastily rewritten, because Bentley is definitely up to something, we just never find out what.
Worth seeing?
In short, no. You'll wish you'd GONE to see something else instead.