Gone

I swear I wrote this before reading the JoBlo review. Suffice to say, we seem to feel the same way about it...
Like my family in the morning, this movie seemed to take forever to get going. It opens with about 20 minutes of shots focusing on Jill (Amanda Seyfried) walking through miles of forest and acting paranoid whenever anyone looks at her. Obviously, something really bad has happened to her, but after so much time showing us her paranoia without explaining why she’s so suspicious you start to lose interest. Finally it’s explained that Jill was once abducted and after she escaped no one would believe her story. She’s searching the forest to find the “Silence of the Lambs” style hole in which the captor held her. When Jill returns home from a midnight shift to discover her sister missing she goes on a one-woman manhunt to locate her, thinking her abductor has returned.
I’ve been an Amanda Seyfried fan for some time, but her recent missteps are making me question my devotion. She’s certainly a capable actress and those bedroom-eyes (as The Wife calls them) can melt your heart, but her last few films make me wish that she could find better movies to showcase her talents. Despite crossing the nudity barrier in “Chloe” the melodrama sank that film, as did the tedious been-there, done-that feel of “Red Riding Hood”. In this movie there is a decent build-up of suspense as she homes in on the villain, but then the movie blows it in the (spoiler alert: “Sleeping with the Enemy” style) pay-off. In a small subplot a rookie detective (Wes Bentley, lover of floating bags in “American Beauty” and Spawn of Satan in “Ghost Rider”) is the only one who wants to believe Jill’s story. The movie starts dealing with his need to help and you begin to believe he is going to be an integral part of the story, but then completely drops the subplot to focus on Jill’s quest. Overall the poorly executed narrative gives the movie a ’choppy’ feel. It seems like they introduced all the elements that would form a fully fleshed-out motion picture, but then decided that Seyfried is a one-woman show and dropped all the other pieces of the story. Quite a split in the voting; I say ‘rent it’ but The Wife was more sympathetic to Jill’s plight and really amused with the multiple, overlapping stories (lies) she tells people to get information, big thumbs up from The Wife. One thing I found distracting… whenever Jennifer Carpenter is on the screen I can’t see her as anything except Debs from “Dexter” (here she’s Jill’s co-worker; I kept waiting for her signature “F%#@ Balls!” line to come out).