Review of Gone (2012) by Fdt44 — 29 Feb 2012

There are far more useful ways to spend one's time; fire up the cable tv, sit back, and one is sure to find something atleast somewhat stimulating. Better yet, avoid it all together, I forgot, this is a tv movie.

What foreign film director, Hector Dhalia, and writer Allison Burnett ( "My Date with Drew," "Feast of Love," "Underworld Awakening,") have here is an idea, so unoriginally effete, hence the title, and so flimsly executed, that the on-screen action is not the least bit engaging; audiences are drawn more keenly, instead, to a Portland setting that is as much a let-down in wasted horror potential as the film's beginning, middle, and end--all negligibly trite.

Specifically, the film hands Seyfried a script that unrelentlessly smothers her; she is neither talented, convincing, or intersted enough to pull it off. As the viewer watches her become an instantaneous crime virtuoso, suddenly equipped with seemingly extensive investigative experience in a knee-jerk's time, they are left sitting, waiting, wondering, how, what is unfolding is even constructed into a film idea; it's mindless.

And, the sight of her large, nefarious sea-greem eyes amidst her cutting brow line and biting lips is what the attention of the view is supplanted with; an expression that almost seems to cry "wolf," only this time.

..sincerely. As for the other characters, they are carelessly under-developed and delineated so dimly, that their dialogue sounds more read-like than memorized: drop the note-cards guys, this isn't high school speech class anymore.

Ultimately, "Gone" is a poorly-written, even more poorly-acted, straight-to-tv movie that hands its protagonist, innately incapable of rendering the least adroitness, a script that is so disconnected with her abilities that she essentially rolls over and sits down; the effort is colorlessly drawn.

Filled with one-liners all too familiar to the genre such as "Just go home and get some sleep," replied with "I'll sleep when he's dead," makes the film's subject matter more a liability than a component of entertainment.

Instead, "Gone's" characters mewl, "Mom, do we have to?" No need to check the temperature of this failure; it's dead.