Gone Girl Review Roundup: Critics (Mostly) Like Ben Affleck Thriller, But Is it "Misogynistic"?

One reviewer writes that, "Gone Girl is to marriage what Fatal Attraction was to infidelity"

By Rebecca Macatee Oct 02, 2014 2:18 PMTags
Ben Affleck, Gone GirlYouTube

If you haven't read Gillian Flynn's book, Gone Girl, or heard Ben Affleck's promise of penis on the big screen, you're probably curious what the critics are saying about the movie...

And? For the most part, it's getting positive reviews. Rotten Tomatoes' "Critics Concensus" on the movie is that it's "Dark, intelligent, and stylish to a fault, Gone Girl plays to director David Fincher's sick strengths while bringing the best out of stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike."

Gone Girl scored an 87 percent "Fresh" approval from the critics on the review site, earning 71 positive reviews and only 11 negative (aka "rotten") reviews.

Twentieth Century Fox

Most critics noted how the film portrayed gender roles within a marriage. USA Today's Claudia Puig mused that "Gone Girl is to marriage what Fatal Attraction was to infidelity," ultimately concluding the movie to be a "topnotch film adaption" of Flynn's book.

Owen Gleiberman of BBC Culture didn't see things this way. "Gone Girl ends up twisting itself in knots to say that men are saps and women are ruthlessly unknowable," he writes. "You could call that vision misogynistic, and you wouldn't be wrong, but you'd be far more accurate if you simply called it ludicrous."

And while Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson deems the film to be "a resonant success," he notes, too, that from one perspective, the story is told with "definite cleverness but also a strong whiff of misogyny."

Twentieth Century Fox

"In that light, Amy is comically villainous, a parody of the most persistent of MRAs' [Mens Rigths Activists'] fears, from emasculation to false rape reporting," he writes. "But seen from another angle, Gone Girl is a keen, admirably risky dissection, and immolation, of the ways that women inflict ideals of perfect, appealing femininity on themselves and each other. (And how men are more than complicit in that.)"

There are also those, like Scott Mendelson of Forbes, who might recognize that yes, it's "easy to see the film as a look at gender roles in a somewhat typical marriage," and that while he "could nitpick If I so chose," he takes it as a whole. On end? He writes, "Gone Girl is a terrifically enjoyable Hollywood movie n the best sense of the term."

Gone Girl hits theaters Friday.