It was almost there...

Rating: 3/10 (28 February 2008)

The first two-thirds of this movie is honestly great. Ben Affleck presents a new level of dark and grit in a story about an abducted child, the private investigators hired to find her, and the local Boston community--a much more ugly background of extras typically used in even the most "social realist" of film works, where the grim of the street is more effectively incorporated into the scarred visages of people without make-up effects. It's a compelling and dark look at a reality where children go missing all the time, where the media has a field-day with the attention while real families are brought into conflict and even the emotional demands of cops are not fully brought into closure.
And then Affleck drops the ball, majorly. At somewhere around the 2/3rds point (give or take a percentage of the play time), suddenly the story switches gears with another one of those unnecessary "twists" that contemporary movies trying to increase the ante tend to throw into what was previously a well-crafted movie. At the point at which the cops are implemented into corruption and guilt for the crime is when almost all of the characters suddenly start working entirely against their motivations and all logic and realism is frankly tossed out the window. This wouldn't be such a problem if it wasn't for the fact that realism was part of the point. But mostly, we as audience are supposed to accept that the following conversation took place:
Titus Welliver: "Listen, I have this niece who I love but who unfortunately is being neglected and abused by her coke-addict mother. I would like some help in getting her away from this damaging environment." Ed Harris: "Okay, I know the captain of the child-abduction section of the police force is dealing with extreme issues of loss from his own child's death, so let's kidnap the girl and place the blame on the coke-dealers while he'll adopt her."
when in the really real world, where even corrupt cops like Ed Harris' character have their credibility to protect and cops like Morgan Freeman's captain would never actually agree to that crap, the conversation would have gone like this:
Titus: "Listen, I have this niece who I love but who is being neglected by her coke-addict mother, I would like to help her." Ed Harris: "Okay, here's the number and the names of some contacts I know in social services, while in the meantime I'll follow up on this whole coke-addiction lead and maybe get me some dealers and users in jail for some good Boston P.D. PR!"
Yep. Nonsense. The point of the movie, of course, is that these decisions create a real moral issue in the main character, played by Casey Affleck, who has to decide where the ethical ground lays and whether it may not be perversely better to allow Morgan Freeman to adopt the girl, albeit highly illegally and sinisterly. Except that crisis of morality makes no real sense and has no real importance in a situation in which none of the characters actually have a logical motivation for the crime. Instead, the movie is filled with truisms, pedophilia substories, and Catholic symbolism to show just how degraded our society can come to be in a way that basically makes this movie just a really intricate and fleshed-out episode of CSI: visceral and sensationally disturbing, but utterly absurd at heart. Too bad, because it was aiming more like "Chinatown" for a new generation.
There are other more minor problems with the movie, such as the fact that Casey's character's girlfriend pretty much doesn't need to be included: at first she plays the sensible foil and emotional weight of the two-character team, but that conflict could have easily been encased in Casey's role alone, especially as that very thing happens as the character gets more and more involved and the girlfriend, similarly, starts slowly phasing out of the plot... Secondly, whereas people can be violent, there seems to a strong inflection on the fact that these characters pretty much resort to violence before most other solutions. Add a scene which pretty much stands in for an unquestioned argument for capital punishment and vigilantism, and some of the less-fleshed out consequences of the narrative become disturbingly clear.
It was a good job on everyone's part, but MAN did it need a massive re-write and re-thinking, especially since it tries to sell itself as the type of movie people are supposed to mull over for weeks.
--PolarisDiB