After 2004's post-Gigli fallout, Ben Affleck's future was not looking bright. Sub-par projects like Jersey Girl, Surviving Christmas and the atrocious Clerks II did little to help, and while Hollywoodland was a step in the right direction, the former A-lister is still nowhere near regaining his former glory.
With his directorial debut Gone Baby Gone, Affleck has admitted he has a lot on the line, but he also seems confident. The gritty crime thriller starring his brother Casey is a bit of a long shot, especially since its bleak subject matter and sometimes gut-wrenching violence will undoubtedly lose it some viewers straight off the bat. Fortunately for the Afflecks' sake, it's also a surprisingly well-written, well-acted film with enough twists to keep those who see it glued to their seats.
Set in the downtrodden Boston neighbourhood of Dorchester and based on the Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) novel of the same name, Gone Baby Gone begins with private investigator Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and his partner/girlfriend Angela Gennaro (Michelle Monahan, previously seen in Mission Impossible III) taking on a missing-child case they don't want. However, after the four-year-old girl’s aunt begs them, the duo cave in, diving headfirst into a can of worms.
After questioning the girl’s “crack-ho” mother (The Wire/Law & Order alum Amy Ryan), Kenzie and Gennaro team up with Ed Harris’s hostile Detective Remy Bressant, who leads them into a pit of drugs, death and deceit. Bressant’s boss, Captain Jack Doyle (a sorrow-eyed Morgan Freeman) soon becomes involved as well, leading into a bloody altercation over missing money with Haitian gang-banger Cheese (Edi Gathegi). This seems like it should be the end of the story, but as it turns out, the rabbit hole goes deeper and darker.
With barely a frame of film in which viewers can catch a breath, a new missing-child case is introduced and the story’s second act begins. Kenzie and Bressant are back on the job, this time tracking a seven-year-old boy. What they find is much more perverse than they expect, however, and after more blood is shed, so is new light on the original investigation.
In the film’s final scene, two characters sit on a couch, listlessly staring into a flat-screen television. This is one of only a handful of sequences in Gone Baby Gone in which audience hearts are able to beat at a regular pace after the relentless pacing of the rest of the film, and presents a real-time silence to ponder the tricky moral issues that have been skillfully posed. This thought-provoking story will stick with you long after the lights have come up, and should bring Ben Affleck’s name out of the mud as well.
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