When offbeat is awful.

Rating: 4/10 (30 March 2009)

Ben Affleck matches his wooden acting talent as a first time director with this shabby attempt to match in mystery and atmosphere Mystic River. Sloppily edited, filled with cliché performances and tortured plot twists it rings false from beginning to end.
A child has been kidnapped in a rough clannish section of Boston called Dorcester. It's clear that the folks in this hardscrabble part of town have little faith or trust in the cops so the family hire a pair of local private eyes to get some answers. The two then form an uneasy partnership with a couple of veteran detectives as they pursue a rogues gallery of low lives to get some answers. It makes for some very haphazard storytelling on the part of director Affleck.
Keeping things deliberately confusing this patchwork quilt of a mystery is poorly stitched together as scenes bump into each other rather than transition smoothly. GBG jolts the audience in more than one scene but in Affleck's incapable hands the action wanders and the actors remain unconvincing. He seems content to allow his music score to telegraph the emotions of actors who offer little more than solemn stares.
Offbeat casting can sometimes revive tired genre types and instill something fresh into the recipe but Casey Affleck looks like a runaway from a boy scout troop confining his performance to cold expression and side glances. PI partner and girlfriend played by Michelle Monaghan does little more than stand around waiting to jump in a quarry. The chemistry between the two is non-existent. Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris simply punch a clock with Freeman under and Harris over acting. As the abducted child's mother Amy Ryan is excellent but it is the only bright spot to be found in this oafish production that flounders from start to finish.