Good, but...

Rating: 5/10 (16 August 2009)

I had high expectations of this film, and while it was good in parts, it was a jumbled, contrived mess with dubious morals in others. For example the hero, Patrick (Casey Affleck) kills a man in cold blood but because the man in question is a known paedophile with a dead boy in his bathroom, he is not arrested or questioned, and his girlfriend even tells him she is proud of him. But the biggest problem for me was the ending. Not only are we expected to believe that it was a conspiracy involving high ranking police officers, we are expected to swallow that Patrick truly believes that the child would be better off with her natural mother, when she clearly would not be. It could have been very good; it wasn't.