There is no moral dilemma here,

Rating: 6/10 (5 January 2019)

Gone Baby Gone
Gone Baby Gone is a gritty crime drama about a missing girl who is essentially is kidnapped to save her from her neglectful mother. There are twists and turns in the movie as it integrates into the script the seediness of an urban Boston community and attempts to convince the movie goer that there is some type of moral debate which permits citizens to take matters into their own hands when social service and law enforcement can't fix complex social issues.
Gone Baby Gone was an enjoyable enough movie to watch and personally I found the acting, casting, locations and situations convincing and supportive of the plot. I also enjoyed not knowing where the movie was heading. This was a refreshing change from the usual. Where the movie has difficulty is the lack of credibility in the reasoning of the plot. While parents kidnap their own children, relatives don't generally conspire to do so and then have the child raised by total strangers to that child. They call social services.
The one major thing that I take issue with is that at one point in the movie Casey Afleck, who plays the role of the self-righteous protagonist, executes a man who killed a child, and is never held accountable for his actions. This flies in the face of his subsequent actions when he then turns in a retired police officer for his role in the kidnapping and conspiring with others to keep the child safe.
At the end of the day this movie is about the reality of the absolute rights of motherhood against people who feel that they can conspire to kidnap a child, because they believe they are acting in the best interest of the child. Given this simple notion, the movie can end but one way, they get turned in. It would be chaotic to live in a society where people can commit crimes because they believe they were acting in the best interest of someone, a thing or an idea.
Bottom line is that GBG was entertaining enough, but there really is no moral issue here, and kidnapping is still a crime.