Gone
Director: Heitor Dhalia
Actors: Amanda Seyfried, Daniel Sunjata, Jennifer Carpenter
Release Date: Monday 30th November -0001
Genre(s): Adventure, Thriller
Running time: 94 minutes
God bless Amanda Seyfried; an actress with an amiable enough screen presence, she's struggled with her films of late. This is something ostensibly different for the actress and in fairness she's hardly the worst thing about it. Gone is farfetched, silly and ultimately trite stuff.
Seyfried is former kidnapping victim Jill. Returning home one night to find her sister has pulled a Houdini, she becomes convinced that the same wrong sort who abducted her, has now made the whole thing somewhat of an annual family event and snatched her sibling. Going a bit loco, she becomes obsessed with tracking down her sister; but not everyone is convinced that she's right. She may in fact be a couple of bars of chocolate short of a selection box.
You have to feel bad for actors when they're in films this inept. Sure, the script is muck from the outset, but they must hold out some hope that it will come together in post production. But the director here, Heitor Dhalia, merely lays down the aesthetics and hopes tension will build purely by giving the actors lines, and switching on the camera. Seyfried is not a bad actress at all, but she can't make this character work, and at points is visibly struggling to.
It's not worth a cinematic release, and even if you stumbled across it bored on television one evening it isn't worth your time. Film critics such as myself are not exactly lauded for our heroic deeds, but many of us have jumped on this cinematic grenade.
