Horrifying child abduction drama

Rating: 1/10 (28 June 2008)

Sometimes reality impinges on fantasy. While this film was being made, Maddy McCann was abducted. By a strange quirk of fate, the four year old girl abducted in this film looks like an identical twin of Maddy McCann. Can you get more disturbing than that? Sensitive souls should not try to watch this film, as they will not be able to take it. This is really, really heavy stuff. Most of the characters in this film are either drug takers or drug dealers. We have here the famous American Underclass. If you are into cocaine, this will all be familiar to you perhaps. Just about everyone in the movie is disgusting and revolting in some way, sometimes to such an extent you think the impossible has been achieved: the film might be described as vomit-as-celluloid. The various murders and mutilations are not necessarily shown in the fullest grisly detail, so hurrah for a tiny bit of restraint. This film was written by Ben Affleck and stars his brother Casey Affleck, who is really extremely good, and the only moral character in the story. He has however a bizarre girlfriend payed by Michelle Monaghan, who looks just like Michael Jackson except that her eyes are so wide apart they look like ears. She spends most of the film hanging back, looking disapproving, dropping out, and throwing a wet blanket on everything. Lots of negative energy there, and a major script and directorial weakness, and frankly a bad actress. With the exception of old pro Morgan Freeman, everybody in this film mumbles so badly that nearly half of the dialogue is incomprehensible. Even old pro Ed Harris delivers a long drunken speech which he forgets to articulate, so we only get half of that too. I don't know what's wrong with the sound technicians these days. I think they have had their brains removed and implanted headphones in their place. Once a director stood by the camera during shooting and would have noticed everybody was mumbling, but ever since they started sitting in chairs and gazing into TV monitors and call that directing, they don't notice anything but how the shot is framed. Big deal! The story of this film is fantastically clever and complex, and ends up being more shocking even than the two child abductions. The story also deals with genuinely profound moral dilemmas in an honest way. It was earnest in intent. But the reason why the film is terrible is that it is a vision of unremitting hell and we have enough of that already, thank you very much, Affleck brothers. Why not make something pleasant to watch sometime? Wouldn't that make a change?