Director's Film Review

No this isn't for Bond (that's for tomorrow night).  I just watched Gone Baby Gone with my parents and I think Martin Scorsese should have taken some notes on it before he made The Departed.  Both are set in the shady underworld of Boston with shadier characters who curse practically every other word.  I was skeptical of Gone Baby Gone when I saw that is was directed by none other than Ben Affleck, but now I wish that he had skipped acting and gone straight to directing.

The film follows Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan, private investigators, who are hired to find a little girl gone missing.  Turns out the girl's mom is a cokehead who ran drugs, and her brother is a straightened excon who seems to care more about the girl than she does.  More surprising is that my mom realized that the cokehead mom is played by Holly from the Office.  Ed Harris is a hardnosed cop and your boy Morgan Freeman is the Police Chief with good intentions.

The one thing that I really liked about this film was that there were a lot of moral ambiguities.  Everyone has the right reasons but do the wrong thing.  In their minds they're doing what's best, but things don't always turn out so clean cut in the end.  The case seems straightforward at first but the plot behind this girl's disappearance slowly unravels.  All around good performances by everyone and some good writing make this film one to watch.  Basically if you thought The Departed was kind of a mess and all over the place (hint hint... Skip) then you should watch Gone Baby Gone to see what a Boston underworld film should be.