The story itself is decent, but has been done to death, however Seyfried has enough charisma, and enough presence to drive it forward. Sadly for Seyfried, some of the acting is a little wooden in parts from some of the supporting members, but I feel she has enough presence. The editing isn't what I'd class as sharp or particularly that good, in fact I thought the production values made the film look a little cheap.
A really enjoyable thriller. Way better then expected. It's one of many kidnapping movies that I've seen, some good, others not so much. Aside from being set in my hometown, this was nothing special. I saw the leading actress interviewed about the film on The Jonathan Ross Show, she explained the story and it sounded like an interesting idea that I was up for trying, Ross didn't give his opinion in any way, only telling people to see it, so when I got the opportunity to see it I did.
Basically in Portland, Oregon young woman Jillian 'Jill' Conway Red Riding Hood's Amanda Seyfried was kidnapped two years by a serial killer and dumped in a deep vertical hole in the middle of the woods, full of human remains, and when the killer let down a rope ladder she made her escape, but police were unable to find the hole, and finding out she was in a mental institute after the death of her parents believe the whole incident happened in her head.
Jill is now a waitress at a local diner, and she lives with her younger college student sister Molly Emily Wickersham and one day a generous regular customer leaves her and her friend Sharon Ames The Exorcism of Emily Rose's Jennifer Carpenter a big tip, but after returning from the quiet shift she is shocked to find that her sister is missing.
Molly's boyfriend Billy Black Swan's Sebastian Stan confirms he hasn't heard from her, and she was meant to be attending an important exam, so Jill becomes concerned that her kidnapper has returned and taken her sister, but the police Lt. Erica Lonsdale Katherine Moennig are sure that she is suffering from her visions, only new homicide detective Peter Hood American Beauty's Wes Bentley says he believes her and is prepared to help her if she needs it.
Jill starts her own search for clues as to where her sister has been taken, starting with questioning her neighbours about a locksmith company's van outside her house in the middle of the night, company owner Henry Massey Ted Rooney points her to the driver, his son Nick Joel David Moore , and she uses some brutal acts to get to finding a receipt listing things a killer would use, e.
Police find out that she is in possession of a gun and plan to arrest her, as because of her mental history she is not allowed a gun permit, and meanwhile she has found the tool store that the van drove to, and from the owner finds out what car this "Digger" drives, and she finds out his real name is Jim McCoy Socratis Otto , and narrowly escaping the police she heads for the next location.
Jill finds the rundown hotel where McCoy is staying, and finding out his room number she breaks in, finding items like duct tape and pet food inside, the same items she experienced during her kidnap, and then she finds a box of matches that are sold in the diner she works, so she races to see Sharon and ask her questions about the McCoy, and she remembers he is the guy that tipped them generously.
Sharon gives her the phone number of McCoy, and after escaping the police again she calls him, and he agrees that they should meet and talk about the situation, so he gives her directions to a location in Forest Park, and there she eventually finds a campsite, and a tent full of photographs of the killer's victims bound and gagged, and at the same time Molly has managed to escape her captivity, she was trapped and tied up under their own house.
Powers and Lonsdale believe Jill's story at last, and meanwhile she has been caught by McCoy and thrown into the same hole she was kidnapped and put in before, but she pulls a bone from the ground and stabs the killer to climb up the rope ladder, but this time she pulls the ladder so he can't get out of the hole, and she grabs a gun to point at him so he will tell her where Molly is, shooting him in the legs he confesses she was under the house and the whole thing was to get Jill back.
In the end Jill pours kerosene into the hole and burns McCoy to death, and when she returns home to reunite with Molly the police question her about what she told them on the phone about the man she was meeting, she only says sarcastically that she imagined it all, and later Bozeman is sent an anonymous package containing the photographs of McCoy's victims and a map for Forest Park pointing to the location of the hole, and he calls Powers to open the case again to investigate the hole and campsite.
Also starring Nick Searcy as Mr. In the leading role Seyfried, often widening her eyes and frantic to get answers, she is just about convincing as the woman desperate to find her kidnapped sister and prepared to do nearly anything to find her, the chase sequences are certainly gripping as you are completely on her side and hoping the police don't catch her and will be proved wrong, I admit some of the dialogue and pacing could have been improved, but it's not such a bad thriller.
Search for her sister's kidnapper. Or was there even one? TxMike 11 June We enjoyed this movie, but all the way through it seemed like there was something somewhat off-kilter with it. Some of the actions the protagonist took and the fact that every time she encountered someone she made up new, always-false stories seemed disingenuous. But my wife said "That's what private investigators do. Amanda Seyfried is the lead here, Jill, not long before she had supposedly been kidnapped and held in a deep pit, but after she became free no one believed her, the police could find no evidence nor locate the pit.
She was put in involuntary hospitalization for her mental state. Her sister's car is blocking hers so, instead of moving it sis says 'Just take mine. But when Jill gets home sis is not there, her belongings suggest she did not change clothes and nothing to indicate where she was.
Jill figures the kidnapper is back, and thought Jill was home alone because her car was there. The whole movie is about Jill trying to get the police to believe her story, but it is Friday and they want to defer it to Monday. Jill is frantic, believes her sis will be dead if they don't find her quickly. So she takes on the role of the investigator, not much of what she does is legal, and soon the police are chasing her instead of the kidnapper. If there really is one.
I like Seyfried, and she is good here, as good as she can be with that character and that script. Wes Bentley who was so good as the spooky neighbor in 'American Beauty' was a cop here, Peter Hood , and it appears to me he was a 'red herring' of sorts. My wife said 'He's a bad guy' and expected him to be in the back seat of the car, but he wasn't.
We never saw any real role established for him, I'm not sure why he was in the cast. Portland, Oregon waitress Amanda Seyfried as Jillian "Jill" Conway gets home from the graveyard shift and discovers her sister is missing from the small house they share. Believing she was abducted, Ms. Seyfried contacts the cops.
The police don't believe Seyfried. They think she is imagining an abduction. It turns out Sheffield is a former mental patient. Claiming to have survived her own abduction, she was found dirty and disheveled. However, an investigation could not find any evidence of the "pit" where Seyfried claimed she was held, along with the bones of other victims.
With the police endeavoring to stop her, Seyfried conducts her own investigation This story begins as a fairly typical abduction thriller. The sister goes missing, which is a crime needing resolution. Thankfully, the plot does not remain that simple. The "Gone" sister is trumped by another mystery. The real story becomes a questioning of the protagonist's sanity. Before finding out about the missing sister, we need to know if Seyfried's mind is "Gone". Developing these sister story lines, writer Allison Burnett weaves a good yarn, with director Heitor Dhalia and Seyfried handling their tasks well enough The problem with "Gone" is that it takes too little advantage of its own intricacies.
A finer picture would have worked out the complexities with more intrigue. For example, the inter-cutting of "flashback" or "flash-forward" abduction scenes should have been be held off until after the police describe Seyfried's unconvincing to them abduction story; then, we can ponder the role inter-cut flashbacks play in her psyche. Later, we see our heroine driving headlong into danger. While we do roll with the punches and accept Seyfried as one incredible lucky sleuth, her long drive into danger is dumb; better to have had her assume her sister was at the crime scene, but not the abductor.
Heitor Dhalia directs this chiller about a young woman Jill Amanda Seyried , who has reason to fear a recurring nightmare. She arrives home from work finding her sister Molly Emily Wickersham Immediately Jill believes her former attacker has returned for her, but took her sister instead. The police are reluctant to help right away, because they have dealt with Jill and her anxiety enough since her own abduction.
Jill sets off on her own, armed, to find her sister and put a permanent end to her nightmare once and for all. Time will become important as Jill realizes the police are on her trail to get her off the streets.
She will get the chance to interact with her former abductor; but what about Molly? Dark and atmospheric; nicely paced story and Seyfried is superb. Unfortunately the film just exists as a case of unadventurous screenplay writing. Gone is written by Allison Burnett, who writes it like some homework assignment set by a bored lecturer at a film studies class. Everything about it is rank and file what you have seen a million times before in this type of genre offering.
A bunch of characters file in for cameos under the guise of red herrings, while our spunky heroine single handedly out-foxes the whole of the Portland police force, while naturally evading capture at every juncture. Everyone but Seyfried's character are just on the periphery of things, where the likes of Wes Bentley and Jennifer Carpenter stand around hoping for the script to give them something worthwhile to do. In fact Carpenter's character is a set up for a late plot development, only for it to be the last we see of her, which is just bizarre in hindsight.
Nothing remotely original here, sadly. It serves decent enough as a time filler, but once the hopelessly weak finale plays its hand, you may come away asking yourself this question, why do films like this continually get green lit by studios when they have nothing more to offer other than putting another title on a budding actor's CV? LeonLouisRicci 23 June A completely focused Performance highlights this somewhat familiar Tale of a Woman who has been severely traumatized by Is it all in her head, is she delusional, did something really happen to her or is she completely "Gone"?
This is played out throughout this competent Thriller as She believes that the source of her pain and suffering is back and has abducted her Sister. Truth is that she is damaged and not really in complete control of her affliction and this lends a certain edginess to the Film as you never really know what She is going to do next, or what Lie She will fabricate, it seems at will, in a moments notice.
Worth a look for Fans of this type of thing and those who like strong Females willing to go the distance even if it means facing your most frightening fears.
All good whodunits have red herrings. These red herrings aren't smelly fish. Instead, red herrings are anything that throws you off the scent of the real killer. Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia and "Underworld: Awakening" scenarist Allison Burnett neglect to exploit red herrings to their fullest advantage in "Gone," a murky, slow-burn, Amanda Seyfried serial killer thriller.
Nothing in this formulaic, PG, minute melodrama is provocative. The heroine is a loony tune with a past, and nobody believes anything she says. Essentially, she is the gal who cried wolf. This interesting but inept psychological saga grows out of a kidnap victim's memory of the felon who grabbed her. He abandoned her at the bottom of a "Silence of the Lambs" type hole where several other victims had perished.
Miraculously, our heroine manages to escape. This sounds like a similar serial killer thriller "Kiss the Girls" minus a sympathetic authority figure. Unfortunately, the Portland Police Department neither found the hole nor the killer so they write our heroine off as a lunatic. All the elements for a good mystery are here, but Dhalia and Burnett break important rules. They don't plant any really smelly red herrings, and the villain poses only a momentary threat.
Indeed, you catch a glimpse of his face but the impact is minimal. The use of a cell phone to lure our heroine into his territory seems pretty lame. Predictably, the authorities aren't amused when she shows up at police headquarters with news that her alcoholic, younger sister Molly Emily Wickersham of "Remember Me" has gone missing.
Molly has been cramming for a test at her university and has alienated herself from everybody, including older sister Jill. Jill is adamant that Molly was abducted because she didn't take anything with her when she left their house. One sympathetic police detective, Peter Hood Wes Bentley of "Ghost Rider" , doesn't give her the cold shoulders that his colleagues do.
Since she cannot get the police to launch an investigation into Molly's disappearance, Jill gets herself a gun and starts questioning everybody who might know something about Molly's disappearance. Jill talks to residents in her neighborhood that she has shunned in the past. Eventually, she tracks down the guy who not only abducted his sister but also her, too. Meanwhile, the police are searching for her now because she has brandished her gun and threatened to shoot a guy.
At one point, the police try to trick Jill into giving herself up, but she outsmarts them. One of Jill's co-workers at the 24 hour restaurant, Sharon Jill Carpenter of "Quarantine" , loans Jill her car so our heroine can elude the police who are closing in on her. As it turns out, the killer rings Jill up on her cell phone and gives her directions deep into the woods where he is awaiting her return. Throwing caution to the wind, Jill follows his directions. Cell phone towers must be pretty prominent because she converses with this dastard for what seems forever.
You can figure out after about an hour of "Gone" elapses that Jill Conway may be crazy but crazy like a fox. Because of this, the police officers treat her like the boy that cried wolf, never taking her claims seriously.
Jill becomes a crazed yet savvy pathological liar, ready to risk her life barging down every dark and creepy road around. Everything from finding lucky clues in obscure places to paying someone a meager amount of money to borrow their car for a getaway contributes to this far-fetched tale.
The plot is meant to get the audience thinking about who the killer may be by presenting a few suspicious characters. Nothing is more disappointing than when the screen turns black and the credits start rolling prematurely, and instead of ending with a cliffhanger, the film ends in confusion. In short, the film sends viewers mixed messages about the motives of the characters and the true direction of the story.
Burnett's Noir narrative is full of heavy-handed contrivances and awkwardly composed scenes, stilted dialogue and cheap red herrings.
One could almost make a drinking game out of the amount of times this film will have you rolling your eyes at what has just happened or been said onscreen. Director Heitor Dhalia Adrift makes matters worse by trying to infuse things with a classic Noir style he is far from proficient in.
If you are well-versed in the Film Noir sub-genre you'll find many of the familiar tropes present and accounted for: the addled sleuth Seyfried ; the sharp camera angles and interplay of light and shadow to create a menacing world around the protagonist; odd-looking actors playing the working-class types the sleuth runs across, shot at sloped angles to make them look more suspicious or sinister.
Taken altogether, the director tries to create a sense that this world is gritty, dark, and full of immoral types at every turn. What Gone manages to prove is that classic Noir style looks silly when presented straightforwardly in a modern context. Homages to classic cinema need to be winking and self-referencing, allowing the audience in on the fact that the oddball stylistic choices are in fact a purposeful reference.
Seeing it represented in this kind of way just comes off as a failed experiment. The resolution of the mystery is unsatisfying and full of so many logical gaps that it is hard to say whether it holds together at all. The character arc for Jill goes to pieces towards the end, when the movie tries one final pivot between the questions of 'Is she crazy, is she not crazy?
Besides those massive disappointments, one of the more vexing things about Gone is its fumbling of red herrings that add nothing to the story except cheap and totally irrelevant distractions. As this Noir tale follows a female sleuth, there are no traditional femme fatale characters, and instead American Beauty star Wes Bentley and Captain America star Sebastian Stan play two potential "homme fatale" types a rookie cop and Molly's boyfriend, respectively whose arcs ultimately go nowhere at all, making them completely arbitrary additions to film.
Another reviewer in my screening was thoroughly vexed and perplexed by one particularly flagrant empty red herring Mild Spoiler : In the middle of the film, one of our "homme fatales" disappears in order to supposedly 'bring soup to his sick mother' - a blatant and obvious excuse to create suspicion about his whereabouts and actions, one would naturally assume.
Only, in a movie like Gone , that red herring is ultimately discarded after a lot of screen time as the character reappears in the background of a later shot no explanation, just standing there , and we are only left to assume that he actually did disappear to bring soup to his sick mother.
0コメント