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Gone Baby Gone Movie Review

Gone Baby Gone is a 2007 crime thriller film directed by Ben Affleck and starring his brother Casey along with Amy Ryan and Michelle Monaghan. I found this movie wildly overrated and forgettable.

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“Kids forgive, they don’t judge,

they turn the other cheek,

and what do they get for it?“

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When four-year-old Amanda goes missing, her aunt Beatrice hires detectives Angie and Patrick to trace her. However, the duo encounter pedophiles, gangs and drug deals during their search operations. While I am a huge noir fan, I do not care for neo-noirs for the most part. This is another one of those modern noir pictures that did not appeal to me in the slightest. The mystery elements are weak, the movie isn’t particularly intense and it mostly focuses on the crime genre, which is my least favorite of these three genres that are noir staples.

Casey Affleck has always been a very good actor and this was the year when he excelled in both ‘Assassination of Jesse James’ and this flick. Here, he was one of the acting standouts in a role that was pretty well developed overall. Another highlight is Amy Ryan who was deservedly nominated for an Oscar for her great work here. Michelle Monaghan is also solid, but Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman were not memorable at all unfortunately.

My main issue with Gone Baby Gone is its very limited appeal. It is not only constrained in terms of its genre appeal, but also its setting. It is an American movie through and through and a film that is so rooted in its Bostonian location that I could not connect with it on a deeper level as I am not from this city or the country at large.

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Thematically speaking, the movie has some important things to say, but it left me emotionally cold. The overall look of the film is also overly dark and uninspired. The directing from Ben Affleck is fine, but the pacing could have been better. The dialogue is strong, but the film is so slow and so overbearingly monotonous in its bleakness that I found it dull and repetitive at the end of the day.

While Gone Baby Gone is well directed by Ben Affleck, superbly acted in particular by Casey Affleck and Amy Ryan and featuring strong dialogue, this is a standard neo-noir picture that is overbearingly dark, depressingly one-note and never as intense as it should have been. It’s a slow-paced, forgettable flick that I found to be highly overrated.

My Rating – 3