Well-acted movie degrades into garbage ending

Rating: 7/10 (14 July 2013)

This movie was all about Tim Robbins for me, he stole the show and really showed great chops as always. I felt through all his pain and sympathized with his character, who very convincingly copped a true Bostonian accent right with the mannerisms. Penn and Bacon were solid as was Fishburne, who was a very welcome addition to the cast. I won't even go into the rest of the film, because for the most part it was a solid life lesson....until the atrocious ending.
Laura Linney's character's overconfidence in her husband's thug life gang king status is absolutely ridiculous. His only real "power" came because he hid in numbers, like any other punk ass thug low-life. His brothers were always around to help with jobs and clean up messes or do dirty work, not to mention gang up on solitary Dave at the end. REAL manly there, REAL kingly. The ending completely glorified this type of ignorant and perfectly childish behavior as a "winning combination". Penn's character essentially kills a guy and gets off clean because of "who he knows"?! I know there are multiple ways to read this, but this is the implication to me. I love Eastwood most of the time, but he completely drops the ball here.
Dave's character is left as nothing even close to a martyr as he SHOULD have been. He's simply cast off a HUGE pissing "OH WELL" as if he had it coming one way or the other, simply because of him getting the rotten end in life. If these kids were truly friends, Bacon's character would have wanted true justice to be done, especially knowing about Dave's prior abduction. Celeste is made out to be a paranoid, lost woman while Linney's bitch of a character remains strong and proud, so entitled of the way things went down. She's proud her man is still standing after it all goes down, as if it's some sort of Dirty Housewives competition. She has no care for HOW it went down, HOW her husband killed a man brutally in cold blood, THE WRONG MAN, and just smiles savagely at a woman who's whole world just fell to pieces.
How is this possibly poetic justice or good storytelling? Sure tragedies happen, but I don't care who you are, you're getting caught eventually. There's NO MYSTERY left here when Jimmy confesses he wishes Bacon's character could have been faster. This entitled son of a b**** answers to no consequences and in the ending scene, the pointing trigger finger of Bacon needs to be taken as a sign that he's got Jimmy's back and his secret is safe with him. I'm still trying to figure how Fishburne won't find this out somehow seeing as he's a good cop with NO affiliations. What really chaps me is that Fishburne even challenges Bacon's loyalty, to which Bacon says I'll have my cuffs on the guy faster than you if it is indeed him. Well, where were the cuffs when he found out the killer of Dave was in fact Jimmy!
The whole parade scene undermines not only Dave's character, but the entire integrity of the story. It essentially preaches that "Hey, if you know the right people, have a enough muscle in town to inflict fear on those who question you and play off the misfortunes of others, you can get away with murder and just about any other kind of violence you want to".
Dave should have died the symbolic martyr, the guy who should have been extremely cared for by his friends and family and not simply ignored after going through a traumatic experience. They should have all paid for their lack of sympathy and empathy towards his rape and abuse that he sustained. He was made a negligible causality of one over-entitled thug's ignorant and egotistical vengeance streak. Jimmy is a complete piece of trash and by the end of the movie, I have absolutely no sympathy for him as a father or a man who lost his daughter. In a lot of ways, HE was the one who deserved such an event and because of this he made sure someone else had to pay for his pain like a little b****. Like a little child, he couldn't handle the heat when it finally, AND RIGHTFULLY, made it's way to his doorstep.
Absolute s*** ending, ruined the entire movie in my opinion.