Dave White
Gone Review

Dave's Rating:


...to sleep.

It's unlikely that you've seen Gone. It's already tanking at the box office -- and there were no critic screenings so I had the pleasure of paying for a ticket to see it in an entirely empty theater. There's a certain kind of pleasure in that, even when the movie is terrible. And Gone is definitely terrible, so the joy of having the place to myself was the only fun I got out of the deal.

Because you probably haven't seen it yet, you should also be prepared for it in the event that you do. You're reading this review, after all, so obviously you're sort of interested in terrible movies. But terrible movies are not all created equally terrible and it would help you to know beforehand what it is and what it is not.

For example, it is not an Amanda Seyfried-starring Taken do-over. Maybe it wishes it were. Maybe it wants you to think it is. The trailer might make you think that it is. But it would have to be exciting to accomplish that task. It would be a great terrible movie if it effectively ripped off that Liam Neeson-kills-all-the-bad-kidnappers film. But nope. It's not.

It is also not extravagantly terrible, not the kind of confusingly inept film that invites groups of terrible-movie-loving friends to enjoy it MST3K-style. It's just regular terrible, a flatline. And for a movie about a creepy cave-dwelling serial killer out to murder Amanda Seyfried but who uses her sister as bait to lure the true target to his woodland hiding-hole, you'd think there'd be some craziness, some serial killer personality, some "nuh-uhhh!" moments, some head-scratch-inducing sequences that make you say, "But wait, didn't she just...?"

Instead, all you get is the credibility-straining idea that the girl from Mamma Mia! could be a diner waitress-turned-ace-detective who hunts down a serial killer, points her .38 and takes skilled aim at the evildoer in the black dead of night, Scooby-Doing it when nobody else around will believe the killer even exists.

Meanwhile, the distractions and red herrings -- and everybody and everything here is a red herring -- are so easy to spot and arrive so loudly and thuddingly, that if you're paying even a tiny amount of attention, the killer will be obvious from the moment the camera refuses him the same treatment. And if that counts as a spoiler to you then you haven't exposed yourself to enough film or TV story templates yet. Start somewhere else, maybe with some years-old reruns of Law & Order: SVU.


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