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MSRP $19.95
RATED Not Rated
RUNNING TIME 87 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES
• None
The Pitch
Amy’s daughter is kidnapped and she is told to kill a man in the hospital she works at if she wants to get her back. When things go bad, she gets entangled in a conspiracy involving the police and city officials.
The Humans
Directed by Grant Harvey Starring Molly Parker, Lochlyn Munro, Susan Hogan and Sonja Bennett
The Nutshell
87 minutes of my life are gone and I want them back.
Gone are the special features and any other menu options
The Lowdown
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The movie opens with a middle aged man running through a forest. The slight overexposure of the sun mixed with the forest greens left me to believe I might be in for something much better than I expected. Within the next 40 seconds, it went from a seemingly tasteful planned overexposure to inexperienced bad lighting design. We couldn’t see the character much through the white light monster, but we could make out the bottom of a tree and the guys legs while we listen to some laborious and scared breathing. We have already seen this man, this lighting is not some purposeful fade or overexposure to hide identity, it’s just bad lighting. Add to that, the guy runs to the nearby road, looks right and left like a good little child and suddenly we see a car plow into him that must have come directly out of the over exposed environment our guy is running from. We also hear tires screech, but I don’t know what from because the car never looks as if it slows or skids, just a straight on pile drive.
White noise?
That intro scene occurs before the opening credits. That is the scene that’s supposed to grip you. It, like most the movie, is a disjointed mix with a hint of good, but once you give out holding your breath that it could have been planned to be good, you get released to the mediocrity of a Lifetime Channelmovie.
When I selected this DVD to review, I went onto IMDB and typed in gone. I returned 13 movies with that title that had been made since 2010. I felt this would be fun to see which one I got. One look at the DVD cover, and I knew that with the cheap cover art, the Lifetime symbol at the bottom and no special features that this is easily is going to fit into the term “Movie of the Week” that I so fondly remember from growing up. Lifetime lives and dies with movies like these. They have their target market, and make tele-dramas to adhere to their viewers. Most movie geeks do not fall in this category.
I wish I could say there was a redeeming grace to gone, but there isn’t. The plot is the only thing that had a hope, but even it was predictable, and had so many uninspired and lackluster plot concepts that this seemed like a bad amalgamation of a James Patterson book, Eye for and Eye with Sally Field and an episode of Survivor.
The funniest thing is the ending. Yes I’m going to spoil, as I don’t believe anyone is going to watch this miserable waste of time. We spend a lot of the time in the movie focused on the fact that our lead was raped 3 years prior, and that the mental stress caused by her rape has affected every aspect of her life. She has been obsessed with self-defense since and will never be a victim again. It is said often she cannot handle stress. At the end of the film, she inadvertently cost two men their lives, she stabs and kills one man and she shoots another. They said she had frequent black outs due to stress. Our final scene has her husband, who previously saw her as an unfit mother, and her getting back together again, and the world is one big happy place. I would have to believe that someone who was already a little unhinged, would have completely lost their mind with particularly the bystanders who died.
Two more things to gripe on, and then I will finish this failed experiment of Russian movie roulette. I have seen paper bags that when the wind hits them, put more conviction into a character. After looking her up her previous work, she actually has award nominations and I must hope that it was for better acting than here. The second she comes on the screen, she barely stumbles through her lines, and you know that she has to be the bad guy, or going to die. Just bad execution, and maybe that was fault of the director who didn’t seem to have any balance elsewhere, but overall reflects upon her. What wasted talent.
We are here to investigate the case of the bad acting.
The sound was also horrible. Any hospital scene was accompanied by the mechanical beeps. If you have spent time in a hospital, you know this to be true in certain areas. Not in a concrete enclosed base floor of a stairwell that leads to a parking deck. This was just another sign of the laziness of the Lifetime movies. These are a few examples, along with the earlier car wreck, that just showed a complete lack of detail.
And they lived happily ever after. until the sequel Gone Again
The Package
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No special features, no interesting art, no reason to say anything here.
Rating: 
Out of a Possible 5 Stars