Why do people love this movie? (Contains Spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (17 August 2004)

Poor Dave Boyle, he about to be abducted in the presence of his two buddies, Jimmy & Sean. His abduction is the beginning of a truly horrific crime. Over the next two hours and fourteen minutes we get to see this crime deepen and expand, filling a much acclaimed movie with it's vile shadows. The crime of which we speak? Perhaps one of the most ridiculous, coincidence driven contrivances ever set to celluloid.
It's about to be a very bad night for Jimmy and Dave.
After thirty years of torment over his childhood molestation, Dave Boyle finally snaps and beats to death some random pedophile. Oh, poor Dave's luck is terrible. At the very same time, his buddy Jimmy's daughter Katie is being murdered by her boyfriend Brendan's younger brother, Silent Ray. All this on the night before Katie is supposed to run off to Las Vegas with Brendan, missing her sister's conformation. Stepping in to investigate Katie's murder is Dave and Jimmy's other friend from that moment thirty years ago, Sean Devine. Oh, and just to add to the insanity (like there wasn't enough), fifteen years ago, Jimmy secretly murdered Brendan & Silent Ray's father. Is this the plot for a widely acclaimed movie or a soap opera?
If all this wasn't enough, the unclear reason for Katie's murder surfaces even more tortured logic. The reason for the murder are never clearly explained, leaving several possible explanations, each more ridiculous than the previous.
 This was the idea my girlfriend and I came up with 20 minutes into the movie, after we had figured out the entire plot to come. Silent Ray kills Katie to keep his brother Brendan from leaving. There is little to support this idea in the movie apart from Brendan's reaction when he discovers the truth, and even that is ambiguous. This is the most plausible motive, and yet is still patently unbelievable.  This was an idea proposed by a friend of mine, Silent Ray kills Katie in revenge for the murder of his father. There is nothing suggesting that Ray even knows that Jimmy killed his father. As a motive it sucks. As an explanation for the murder, it sucks even more.  Then there is the movie's somewhat confusing explanation given by Sean to Jimmy. That Silent Ray and his buddy were just screwing around and happened to unwittingly select Katie as the target of their inexplicable criminal endeavor. Then they accidentally shoot her after realizing who she is, perpetuating her beating and murder to cover their crime. If this is the movie's explanation, than writers have created an even more insanely ridiculous coincidence than the one supporting the main plot.
The fact that the murder's motive was barely explained in the movie just adds to the movie's lack of believability. And there are even more unanswered questions and unlikely plot devices:
 Where was Katie driving in the middle of the night (since it seems unlikely she was going home before running off to Las Vegas)?  Do pedophiles ever work in pairs and molest their victims together? I couldn't find a single, credible case like that portrayed in the movie.  Would a cop with connections to both the victim and suspect really still be working the case?  Would and cop really let a couple of neighborhood thugs meddle in their investigation?  Is it really believable that Dave Boyle would stay in the neighborhood?  Why does Dave's wife Celeste go to Jimmy with her suspicions rather than the police? Does she really want her husband to be murdered?  When Dave is insisting to Jimmy that he murdered a pedophile, not Katie, why doesn't he take Jimmy and the Savage brothers to where he dumped the body? This is immediately the most obvious choice for someone trying to save his life and prove his innocence.
This last point leads to the last coincidence, that the police find the body of the pedophile just a few hours too late to save Dave's life.
When you add this series of ridiculous coincidences and Hollywood contrivances to some horrible overacting and Laura Linney's laughably overblown transformation at the end of the movie you get the stuff of mediocrity, not greatness. Why then is this movie regarded by many as being Oscar quality? It seems that good cinematography, attention to visual detail and a slowed pace can turn schlock into art for many (see Troy). Add to this actors who can act emotion (even widely inappropriate emotion), and you have film-making at it's finest. Story and plotting count for little any more. Obviously the standards of those who watch movies have grossly deteriorated.
And a final word about Sgt. Whitey Powers. He's smart enough to tell from the set of a man's shoulders if he's a former convict, but still too dumb to realize that the victim of child molestation is no more likely to grow up and murder adult women than any other person.