Gone

It's obvious that Gone wants to be a Hitchock-style thriller about paranoia, but it fumbles almost right out of the gate by the casting of Amanda Seyfried. She doesn't know how to sell this material. Her character should look like she's constantly on the edge, terrified, and more than a little desperate. The way Seyfried plays it, she looks only mildly peeved that her sister could possibly be in the hands of a deranged serial killer, and the police think she's crazy. If only the lead performance was all that was wrong with this movie.

Jill Conway (Seyfried) is a tortured young woman still traumatized by the events one year ago, where she was abducted from her bed by a shadowy figure, and dumped in a hole in the middle of the woods that was filled with human remains. When her kidnapper climbed down into the hole to have his way with her, she managed to conk him on the head with some bone from one of the past victims, and escape. When the police eventually found her, they were skeptical of the story, since she could not I.D. the man responsible, nor could they find any evidence of the hole she was supposedly dropped into when they searched the woods. Jill persisted, and the police eventually threw Jill into a mental hospital, since she had a history of mental trauma since her parents died years ago, and thought she was just seeking attention.

Since being released from the hospital, Jill has been released into the custody of her younger sister (Emily Wickersham). The sister tries to help Jill lead a normal life, and set up dates with various men for her, but the trauma of past events still haunts every aspect of her life. She even takes self defense classes every night before she goes to work at a local diner during the midnight shift. Jill returns home from work one morning to find that her sister has mysteriously vanished without a trace. Jill is certain that the man responsible for her kidnapping has come back, and took her sister in a sort of vengeance for escaping. She has no proof, obviously, other than she finds it strange that her sister would leave their home in the middle of the night in her pajamas the night before a big college exam she was studying for. She goes to the police, but they are not in the mood to believe her story. "People have a right to go missing", one of the disbelieving officers rather cruelly tells her.

Jill just can't shake the feeling that someone has her sister, however. And who can blame her? Jill apparently lives in the red herring capital of the world. Almost everybody she meets and questions is shady, menacing, or a Steve Buscemi lookalike. There's the creepy guy across the street who hasn't been the same since his wife died. He claims he saw a locksmith truck parked outside Jill's house late last night, which leads her to the local locksmith, where she questions the creepy and suspicious looking man who owns the business, as well as his equally creepy and suspicious looking son. This conversation leads her to a guy who works at a hardware store who is so friendly and sunny, you know he has to be harboring the darkest secrets of anyone in the town. He leads her to a seedy hotel, where she has a run-in with the creepy and suspicious looking janitor, who in turn leads her to...Do I need to go on? The movie's one big chase, broken up by occasional scenes where the heroine questions people who exist to set off red flags in the audience.

As a thriller, Gone never quite tries hard enough. It's leisurely when it should be intense, and a lot of this has to do with Amanda Seyfried. Someone really should have taken her aside, and asked her if she understood what this movie is supposed to be about, as she seems far too controlled to pass herself off as a desperate woman on the edge. Her character has been written with intensity, but the performance never matches it. But then, no one gets to make much of an impression - Not Seyfried, not the actors playing the cops trying to hunt her down (who always seem to do the wrong thing for the sole reason the plot requires them to), and certainly not the psycho, who wen we learn the identity of, creates a new low for letdowns.

Finally, there's the ending. Hoo boy, the ending. I won't spoil it, but should you see this movie (and I'm not recommending you do), ask yourself if it was all worth it. All the trouble, all the red herrings, and all the running around leads to a lame brained climax that gives new meaning to the phrase "pulling an ending out of thin air, and seeing if it sticks". But by that point, I didn't really care about the answers to the questions the movie had been asking for some 95 minutes or so. I just wanted to leave. At least Gone has the good sense to wrap up right around this point, rather than drag it out any further.

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