A Pointless Exercise in Human Nastiness

Rating: 3/10 (7 November 2007)

This crabby pill of a movie takes place in the dreg districts of Boston and stars Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan as a boyfriend/girlfriend detective team who are hired to search for a missing child. What follows is a twisty plot with a stupid and implausible finale. The movie is surly, everyone involved is in a bad mood, and the whole thing left me gloomy and angry.
What am I supposed to take away from a movie like this? The film thinks it's asking weighty moral questions, like what does it mean to do the right thing, what's the difference between what is right and what is legal, etc.? But any point gets lost in the ugly, horrid world the movie lives in. Director Ben Affleck has been getting loads of praise for painting such an accurate portrait of working-class Boston, and maybe he did, but then why in God's name does anyone want to live there? The film makes Boston look like the worst place on Earth, filled with degenerates and thugs. One scene set in a drug house -- by far the most demoralizing scene in the film -- is straight out of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," inbred hillbillies and all. After a while, your only defense in this film is to laugh at the preposterous human ugliness Affleck unrelentingly heaps on you.
Maybe good performances could have saved the movie -- or more accurately, good characters, because the performances are decent. But I don't know what any actors could have done with this material.
I'm sick and tired of Hollywood churning out movie after movie that has no reason for existing other than to make people feel bad. What happened to movies that communicate ideas and engage in dialogue? Now film makers seem to think that what moviegoers want more than anything is to simply wallow in human baseness and meanness. It's movies like "Gone Baby Gone" that are responsible for the insidious belief that the world is a much more nasty and violent place to live in than it really is.
I'm glad this one bombed.
Grade: D