Every time a film with Amanda Seyfried gets released, whether she’s the lead or a supporting character, I always cringe in fear. It’s not because Seyfried is a bad actress. I think she’s a very attractive person, and she does have potential to do something great, but she always gives in to awful scripts like Red Riding Hood, In Time, and Dear John.
Her and Olivia Wilde are almost one in the same when it comes to choosing the next film in which they’ll star. They’re both very beautiful, and they do have the chance to make something of their names. Yet, they take the first thing that comes across their table, and it kind of makes me wonder if they’re just doing it for the money.
With Gone, Seyfried has made another bad decision and I fear her career won’t go much farther if she continues to do films like this. It’s not that Gone is the worst film of her career and this marks the end of it. Oh, no. She’s done much worse (Red Riding Hood, for example). But if she continues with this downhill streak, I’ll be a bit curious as to how long her career will last.
In Gone, Seyfried plays Jill, a waitress at a local restaurant. One year prior, she was abducted by a random stranger and thrown into a hole. She was able to escape, but her abductor was never found. This lead to Jill receiving therapy, and the police think her story is a work of fiction. Whenever Jill reports a missing persons case, the police turn the other cheek.
One day, she comes home and finds that her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham), has vanished. Jill believes the same person who kidnapped her a year ago may have kidnapped Molly. Since the cops think she’s crazy, they ignore her, and Jill is left to figure out the mystery on her own.
The film’s title best describes the remembrance of it once the credits roll. Everything that is presented is figured out before it appears on screen. It also has the feel of something that could probably be found on the Lifetime channel without all the heavy romance, of course. It’s dull and very simplistic. The shock and suspense is watered down, and what we’re left with is a film that is an average, run-of-the-mill thriller.
For the majority of Gone, the viewer is supposed questioning whether or not Jill is crazy. Having that already running through the viewer’s thought process, one would hope the filmmakers would have something unexpected up their sleeves. If not that, then they could take the generic plot and turn it into a sort of tribute to older cinema like Martin Scorsese did with Shutter Island. Unfortunately, none of that happens. Once the truth comes out, the film goes from average thriller to contrived mess.
Though I applaud the film for having some kind of feminine heroism symbol attached to it, Gone becomes too silly in trying to express the message of overcoming those who doubted the main character. Seyfried isn’t given much of a chance to shine when she has to belt out generic lines from a script that doesn’t try anything new.
One can hope that Seyfried will come eventually through and star in a film that isn’t convoluted or dopey. But with films like Gone, hope is sinking very quickly.
