Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

Gone Girl

Whether it's expressed as "Women are complicated." or "Chicks are fuckin' nuts." or "Bitches be trippin', yo!" the sentiment is the same:  if you've got a vertical smile, insanity's your style.  Being a neo-post-proto-card-carrying-dick-swinging feminist, I refuse to buy into such egregious gender stereotyping.  

And yet, I can't deny that I've known more than a few wackjob, rabbit-boilin', freak off the leash ladies in my time.  To be fair, I've also encountered a good number of narcissistic, violent, delusional dudes over the years.  I guess if I'm being honest, the world is full of psycho girls and asshole guys. 

Gone Girl is all too aware of this red-toothed, screaming truth.  It might as well be called When Asshole Met Psycho.

The movie Gone Girl was based on the book of the same name, and both were written by a woman, Gillian Flynn, who probably scares the shit - as well as most of the piss, snot and other bodily fluids - out her husband.  Because authors tend to write what they know, and Flynn's female lead, Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), makes the Countess Bathory look like Carol fucking Brady.

Amy is married to Nick (Ben Affleck), a pretty boy, overly-entitled, cleft-chinned, smug son of a bitch.  Gee, I sure hope Affleck didn't strain himself too much stretching to play such an alien character. 

But hey, at least he got the part.  Reese Witherspoon, who's a producer on Gone Girl, wanted the Amy role for herself.  How badly must she have cornholed that audition not to win the lead role in a movie she was producing?!  Probably bigger than that Iberian Peninsula she calls a chin.

And you know you've pissed off the movie gods when you fuck up casting Neil Patrick Harris.  NPH is so funny he could get laughs flambeing a kitten at a PETA rally, but he's more wrong than a Speedo on a fat guy as Desi in thisLifetime-level nonsense.

Gone Girl wants to be a hip, modern whodunit, but it's really the murder mystery equivalent of the kids' games on a Denny's placemat - you know, the mazes and crosswords even your "slow" cousin Freddie can finish before the waitress shows up with waters.  The only question is whether Nick killed Amy, and the movie spews the answer faster than a pimply-faced 15-year-old popping his cherry.

With Gone Girl, director David Fincher  perfectly illustrates the Favorite Band Paradox, which states that the longer a band stays together the better it should be (what with more practice, more gigs, more drug-fueled debauchery, etc.), yet in almost every case a band's best work is its earliest work, and its later output is so lame by comparison that "favorite" is replaced by "hated." 

Early Fincher efforts like Se7en and Fight Club blew people's minds.  His later creations, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, just blow.

February 1, 2015  Video release review rather than theatrical release review because I do what I want.