Changeling: superficial, superfluous, navel staring

Rating: 1/10 (23 May 2009)

It's a story about a woman who loses her son to a kidnapping and probably (because that part is left out) child molesting murderer.
In the process we learn that the police is very corrupt and they even lock her up in an asylum when she refuses to accept a boy as her son, which the police provide in an attempt to make the press believe that the case is solved.
But one of them, the one good cop, gets a clue which leads him directly to the mass grave of twenty murdered boys and eventually to the killer. More or less at that pace.
The corrupt are punished all the way up to the mayor, procedures for committing women to insane asylums are ordered to be tightened (but were they?) and the murderer is hanged with a cowardly yelp when the trap door opens beneath him. But not even a dribble of reality escapes from his pants, over his shoes and onto the floor.
And this detail encapsulates the style and mood of the entire movie. It pretends to be factual while lacking all detail. Not one character develops, even though the story spans several years. There is not one real action, or gesture that even hints at any kind of a human relationship between any of the characters. Not even between mother and son. Any sympathy between characters is suggested by the mere fact that they communicate. Nothing more.
In other words: it is as flat as a pancake on which Dirty Harry himself danced a jig or two.
Right at the end we are told that her son heroically helped another victim escape and may even have escaped himself. The mother replies that this means there is still hope her son is alive.
Then follow the titles in which we learn that she never gave up the search, the guilty were punished and that part of LA got a new name, as if that were significant to anything else but local folklore.
In short: the script presumably reads like a local history article in a high school newspaper and the acting is two dimensional. It's as if a local kid tells a story he heard some months ago but forgot all the relevant details. But he remembers it happened 'right here'.
It leaves me with the feeling that so much more of a story could have been told if someone just had done their homework. And at the same time I was grateful that someone hadn't.