"Kids forgive, they don't judge...and what do they get for it?"

Rating: 3/10 (3 January 2017)

When a little girl from a Boston neighborhood is abducted, the child's aunt hires a local couple to ask questions of the neighborhood residents, who may know something about the child's disappearance but won't talk to the cops. Adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel, co-written by Aaron Stockard and Ben Affleck, who also directed, is a bleak whirlpool of low-life characters, drug dealers, drug addicts and gangs. Some of the violence hits hard, yet Affleck cannot seem to stage his major sequences (to say nothing of his smaller moments) without artifice, and no one comes out of the picture looking good (you know there's a problem when even Morgan Freeman, portraying the suspicious police captain, fails to register). In the central role of the streetwise young man whose life is irrevocably changed by the kidnapping, Casey Affleck (Ben's brother) is an uninteresting screen presence, matching his garbled line readings (for 'realism') with open-mouthed reactions and shifting, faraway stares. *1/2 from ****