Be Affleck crafts one the years best films, or would have been except its source material breaks apart in the final stretch to the end

Rating: 7/10 (23 December 2007)

Ben Affleck marches toward an eventual Best Director Oscar, maybe not this year, but mark my words he will be getting one if he repeats his stellar work on Gone Baby Gone.
This is the story of a private detective and his partner who are asked by the family of a missing girl to help the police. The family knows that some people won't talk to cops so they hire Casey Affleck to augment the investigation. It quickly transpires that the loving mother was far from saintly and that there are other problems in the investigation.
Brilliantly acted and monstrously wonderful on a technical end this film hopefully will get a boat load of Oscar nominations for all concerned at years end. Casey Affleck, Ed Harris and pretty much everyone else are at the top of the game and reason enough to watch the film. Director Ben Affleck has created a film that is a masterpiece mood and emotion. We are in Boston and these are real people. Affleck has managed to take any notion of this being unreal and a story being performed by actors and removed it from our minds. Thats a huge order when faced with titans like Harris and Morgan Freeman. Its a stellar achievement. I can't say enough, actually all I can say is that he's made something real and tangible, which is the highest praise I know.
The problem with the film is the source material. Based on a book by the Author of Mystic River (another movie/story with plot holes you could drive a truck through) the film suffers from a complete break down of logic and reason in the last half. What is going on, really is so potboiler-ish as to be absurd. I kept wondering if I was missing something, and then realized I wasn't. I know that the twist and turns allow for the exploration of moral question and issues, but at the same time they are unbelievable in any real world sense. The problems are such that it keeps a good film from being what it should have been, one of the best of the year.
Still the technical virtuosity of Ben Affleck and his cast make this a film that you really should see. Acting and directing don't get better than this.