Gone: Twist Tactics Gone Awry

Two years ago the sleepy city of Portland, Oregon was rocked by tragedy when Jill (Amanda Seyfried) was abducted from her home, seemingly the next victim in a long line of young females that disappeared never to be heard from again.  But Jill, unlike the others, escaped, "overcame her captor" as the local newspapers said.  Two years later, she carries the torch for the victims who weren't so fortunate, scouring the nearby national park for signs of the hole out of which she literally climbed two years earlier and harassing local police any time another young damsel disappears.

Yet carrying the torch may as well mean carrying a yoke for young Jill as her crusade is not without its share of burdens.  On a medication regime and a stranger to a smile, Jill has become intimately familiar with paranoia, giving 110% in her self-defense class and offering to walk fellow waitress, Sharon (Jennifer Carpenter), to her car after their late shift even if it is parked directly outside the front door.  Though viewed as obsessive by others, to Jill, her behavior is nothing more than preparation.  She always told everyone "he" would come back.  After all, she was the only victim who ever escaped. 

It's this mentality that has Jill convinced that her sister Molly's (Emily Wickersham) disappearance the morning before a big exam is not a flight of youthful fancy, but the kidnapper's revenge on the one who got away.  As she is wont to do, Jill storms down to the nearest police precinct insisting to Detective Powers (Daniel Sunjata) and Lieutenant Ray Bozeman (Michael Pare) that "he's come back" and if they don't act quickly, Molly will wind up buried in a hole in the forest.  Hearing Jill cry wolf one too many times has made the detectives numb to her plight and their apathy convinces Jill she needs to find Molly on her own. 

"What if she does find him?" asks the sympathetic Detective Peter Hood (Wes Bentley).

"She won't," Bozeman replies.  "He doesn't exist." 

And thus, we have what's supposed to pass for the major twist of Gone.  I'd apologize for revealing the major spoiler, but seeing as the filmmakers placed it firmly in the first 20 minutes of the film, then I really shouldn't be the one apologizing.  I'd imagine that by introducing the possibility of Jill being mentally unstable so early in the film, screenwriter Allison Burnett (Untraceable, Bloodfist III: Forced to Fight) assumed that this would cast of a shadow of doubt over all of the protagonist's subsequent actions.  However, in order to buy into such a hypothetical, we as audience members must accept two absurdities: 1) that the local police force is incompetent to the point of failing to uncover even a single piece of evidence to corroborate Jill's kidnapping two years prior (the fact that she went missing for weeks and crawled her way out of a hole in the forest was apparently too circumstantial); and 2) Jill's nebulous psychological condition is sympathetic enough to make up for the fact that she pulls a gun on innocents, flees from the police who rightfully see her as a threat to the general public, and manipulates her best friend and a seedy hotel janitor into giving her their respective cars. 

Admittedly, that sounds very much like the behavior of a woman who is mentally unhinged enough to fabricate a story about a kidnapper or overreact to her sister's disappearance, but if the filmmakers want us to potentially believe that a girl who is so flagrantly and consistently breaking the law is doing so because of mental trauma, then how could they expect us to want or hope for anything other than Jill's arrest and imprisonment where she no longer poses a threat to society? 

I realize you won't find my name attached to any screenplays on IMDB (unless I change my name to Ben Ramsey), but it seems to make more sense to me to hold off on the reveal of the possibility that the kidnapper didn't exist until the end of Act II, when it could actually be considered a twist as it puts the previous 70+ minutes worth of events into an eery and tragic focus.  That way when Jill is driving into the dark woods to confront the man she believes has kidnapped her sister, there's some mystery and intrigue as to what she'll find.  Instead, Gone stands as a very weak thriller that relies on pity rather than empathy to connect the audience with its melodramatic protagonist.