Familiar, but very well done

Rating: 7/10 (23 December 2010)

A strong, fun and very well detailed crime thriller, but not nearly as subtle or emotionally and morally complex as Affleck's earlier 'Gone Baby Gone'. There's a lot of cliché's here, especially in the third act; car chases, huge over-the-top .shootouts which, while well handled, make this feel much more like a familiar Hollywood movie. Also, some of the supporting characters fall into 'types' we've seen so many times before, something 'Gone Baby Gone' generally avoided very well, despite being a hard boiled detective thriller, hardly an under-done genre. Indeed, a lot of this film, including the main plot itself treads familiar water, but it does it with enough grown up intelligence, good acting, and specificity to let us get caught up anyway. And at least, by the end a few of the 'obvious' set ups, have led us somewhere different than the standard Hollywood treatment would lead us to expect.
I just hope Affleck, an obviously extremely talented film-maker, returns to the kind of thematically richer and more original material he mined in his first film.