My nitpicking of an otherwise awesome film.

Spoiler Alert

I am not going to write how good a movie Gone Girl is, there should be umpteen of them floating around the Internet by now. Yes, its really good, gripping would be the apt word. My wry about Gone Girl is mainly with an improbable scene were Neil Patrick Harris (NPH) gets his throat slit.

All the deviousness, deception, and manipulative behaviour of Amy can be corroborated under the pretext of her obsessive need to be in control, but to kill a person, thats a whole other ball game. Even so, to accurately do a throat slit with a box cutter for the first time would take some doing. It would have been much palatable if she had just stabbed him violently. In Fargo, Lester Nygaard did what he did in a murderous rage with a messy aftermath. Nothing like Amy’s precision work with the box cutter. Here Amy is portrayed like a fusion of Malvo: a calculating, perfectly sane psychopath, and Lester: first-timer, inexperienced. A newbie playing assassin - I didn’t want to believe it.

Acting wise, NPH was a little off at some places, like some of his expression were not suiting the emotions at play. I could be wrong here, watching NPH in stereotypical roles could have biased my judgement. During the scene where he gives Amy a tour of his magnificent lake house - being his flamboyant self - he was spot on.

Here in India, censorship is pretty rampant. Sex scenes and it’s likes often gets cut out even if the film is ‘A’ rated. One interesting thing I noticed is the use of focusing (zooming-in) to not screen the un-screenable, but still preserving the importance of a scene. A pretty nifty idea.

All said, solid film-making; Ben and Pike, nailed it. 8⁄10

With this performance of Ben Affleck I’m really intrigued and exited about how he is going to tackle the role of Batman. I just couldn’t get my head to transition from Christian Bale to Ben Affleck.