As
Amy Dunne in “Gone Girl” Rosamund Pike joins the ranks of  Sharon Stone
in “Basic Instinct” and Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” and to say
more would give away the last hour and twenty-five minutes of the film.

The
film is mostly a ‘He said-She said’ narrative of a possible kidnapping
and/or murder, starting with Amy and Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) returning
home, after both losing their jobs in New York City, to North Carthage,
not far from St. Louis, to take care of his mother dying of cancer and
his father drifting into Alzheimer’s. Amy’s parents, psychologists,
(David Clennon and Lisa Banes), have become wealthy writing books about a
child, Amazing Amy, who was always just a bit better than their real
daughter. We see brief scenes of Amy and Nick meeting and falling in
love.

Within a few minutes we see Nick coming home to an empty
home leased by the couple with money from her trust fund from the books,
their cat outside, a table upended, the glass top smashed and Amy
missing. It isn’t long before evidence points toward Nick as the
murderer of his golden wife Amy, his being pursued by detectives Rhonda
Boney (Kim Dickens) and Jim Gilpin (Patrick Fuhgit), his twin sister
Margo, (Carrie Coon) supporting him 100% while a sensation seeking TV
cable reporter/host, played by Missy Pyle, slowly turns the public
against Nick. Eventually Margo makes Nick hire news making lawyer,
Tanner Bolt, (Tyler Perry). Along the way we meet Desi Collings (Neil
Patrick Harris), Amy’s boyfriend, so he thinks, in high school, Carrie
Wilson as Noelle Hawthorne, a neighbor of Nick and Amy’s, Emily
Ratajkowski as Andie Hardy, a student in the one college class Nick
teaches, plus Boyd Holbrook and Lola Kirke, as Jeff and Greta, plus a
cameo by Sela Ward as another cable TV host.

With the exception
of Neil Patrick Harris in a wasted, undefined role, and the roles of
Boyd Holbrook and Lola Kirke, though acted strongly, could have been cut
without taking anything away from the story except making it shorter,
the acting by the cast is of the first order with Ben Affleck at his
best while Rosamund  Pike is definitely going to be up for most of the
acting awards.

The screenplay by Gillian Flynn, based on her best
selling novel, and the direction by David Fincher, serve the film well
to hold the audiences attention as all the production values do.. They
have made it one of those movies that will make people who haven’t read
the book to do just that to see what, if anything, they have missed.