Not gone at all...

Rating: 7/10 (20 January 2015)

I didn't enjoy this film, although I did enjoy most of the mid section, it's just that it started to notch down minute-by-minute until its conclusion, where it flat-lined.
The pivotal moment of this film is the quarry scene, where we're duped by the Director. The girl disappears once and for all and, even though they drag the lake and don't find anything, we're supposed to believe that the girl has 'gone' for good and is dead. Of course she isn't.
The film is definitely thought-provoking, but only succeeded in depressing me on every level. Not one person benefited in any way from the decisions made in this film. The aggressive cop was killed and his wife widowed. The private detective broke up with his long-standing girlfriend, who is also single again. The Morgan Freeman cop was arrested and sent to prison instead of retiring in peace. The little girl subjected to a selfish c*nt of a mother, effectively abandoned all over again. So everybody comes out the worse because the world is a bag of trash and we're left to contemplate what could have been if some less honest decisions had been made.
There were too many moments of non-credibility too. Hitting a biker-type over the head with the butt of a gun in a bar and walking out with your back turned against the bar door. No way. Sixteen marauding guys pouring out of that door with guns and shotguns - that's what I was expecting. Being chased up the stairs by a fat woman with a gun, breaking into a room, bolting the door and then resting your shoulder against that door in repose - again, saved by that magic door, with no shoulder bashing or bullets firing through, just a convenient pause. A girlfriend who doesn't rely on her motherly instincts to return a baby girl to her MOTHER, but instead thinks leaving the girl with strangers is the right decision, but worse of all, her boyfriend's contrary decision causing the couple to split up. Ridiculous, considering there was no previous evidence that the couple were struggling in their relationship at all.
I suppose it was a credible film as a whole - Morgan Freeman having lost his own daughter at 11 or 12, effectively kidnapping the child for himself and his wife as a replacement, but I didn't feel the emotions.
And afterwards I checked out the director, just to make sure. Ah, Ben Affleck. I've got nothing against him as an actor, but The Town was ridiculous - especially the car park shoot-out scene, and Argo was boring, boring, boring, so no surprises there. The film was dull, depressing and pointless, pivoting on the back of a society where nothing good comes out of it all. The only beneficiary of the events was the drug-addled mother, who seemed to do OK in the end. And that's the message the director wants to put across? We all do good and behave morally, but either die, go to prison or suffer? But take drugs, don't give a damn and society will pull us through. Smug man.