A question of ethics and morals, what would you do?

Rating: Null/10 (18 February 2008)

A very good movie, directed by Ben Affleck in the same Boston neighborhoods he grew up in. A young girl disappears, the police and private investigators search for her, but when you don't find a child within the first day or so, usually it means the child is "Gone Baby Gone."
In the movie Casey Affleck as Patrick Kenzie tells a cop he is 31, even though he looks like he is 20. He really was 31 when the filming was done. The younger brother of the director, he does a great job as the neighborhood small-time investigator hired by the family to help find the little girl. Michelle Monaghan as Angie Gennaro is his girlfriend and partner.
Morgan Freeman is good as Capt. Jack Doyle, the police chief whose men are investigating the disappearance. One of the detectives is Ed Harris as Det. Remy Bressant, originally from Louisiana. His partner is John Ashton as Det. Nick Poole.
The grieving mother is Amy Ryan as Helene McCready, who claims she was gone for about 30 minutes when her daughter disappeared. As Kensie begins to talk to those who know her, he soon finds holes in her story. Things are not as straightforward as everyone first thought.
It would spoil the movie experience to know how all this turned out. But in the end many will be asking themselves, "What would I have done?" The movie doesn't seek to answer that question.
SPOILERS. The mother had been at a bar, drinking and snorting drugs when her daughter disappeared. She had also been working small jobs as a local "mule", delivering drugs for a dealer. In one trip, she and her even more shady boyfriend stole the large sum of cash and hid it. The daughter was actually removed from her home as a way to give her a better life. Her brother in law was involved, as well as Jack Doyle, and in a late night ambush, set up by the cops, the drug dealer was killed, they faked the little girl's jump into a deep pond, and Doyle after resigning planned to take the little girl away and raise her as his own. When Kenzie figured all this out, he confronted Doyle at his country home, who pleaded for Kenzie to walk away and give this girl a better life. But he couldn't, because he knew the mother had the rights. He and his girlfriend broke up over his decision.