One review mentioned it was part thriller and part ethics lesson, and how true that is. The film has some nice twists and (this is no spoiler) doesn’t quite end the way you think it will.
Ben Affleck did a great job as director - he put you right into the neighborhood and did a fantastic job at character development - even some of the minor characters were fleshed out and became real.
Certainly one of the best films I have seen this year so far. I highly recommend seeing it!
BTW, there are some grisly scenes, so if you are the squeamish type, you might not like it as much as I did.
Throughout the entire movie I kept thinking, “Is that really Ed Harris!?!”. He was pretty darn good in this movie - as was Casey Affleck (but I’ve long been a fan of his since Gerry so that was no surprise to me).
As for Ben Affleck…I thought he did a pretty darn good job for a first attempt. There was one or two pretty lame transition shots but nothing that really ruined the movie in any way - it’s just nitpicky stuff.
Yeah, I thought it was absolutely fantastic. It was weird - it’s ostensibly a happy ending, but it’s still such a soul-crushing one. And Ed Harris…holy cow, he looked fantastic.
One thing that I just didn’t catch:
What did Remy say during the hospital confessional that made Patrick know he lied? I know it’s something about him knowing Ray beforehand, but I didn’t hear anything in the story that was anything like that…what did I miss?
My friend and I saw this last night. I was pleasantly surprised - I was sort of expecting just standard CSI-type mystery/thriller, but there was more to it than that. However, I did find it a bit confusing and hard to follow in places. ArizonaTeach, I wondered the same thing - I just couldn’t quite wrap my head around the intricacies of the plot. I came away wishing I could watch it again, but I doubt I will until it comes out on DVD.
Remy had said earlier, sometime around when cuntface admitted to stealing the money with Ray, that he didn’t know Ray, but when he was confessing planting drugs on the unfit father, somewhere in there he mentioned that Ray was a long-time informant of his. I guess Patrick thought, well, if Remy had lied about that, what else did he lie about? and started thinking hard and deep about the whole scenario and eventually came up with the answer.
I though this was a truly good movie. Ben Affleck is a gifted director and I hope he gives us plenty more films. I also hope Casey Affleck finally gets the attention he deserves. This will never happen, but oh I would love to see him get a double Academy Award nomination, Lead for Gone Baby Gone and Supporting for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Casey and Ben have both stepped out of shadows with this movie. Casey from Ben, and Ben from Damon.
It’s funny, as I was watching it it seemed so familiar, though of course I’d never seen it before. By halfway through the movie I was convinced that it was a remake of another film that I’d seen, because I kept knowing what was going to happen before it happened. That was a bit distracting, but the movie’s so good it didn’t matter much. By the end it finally dawned on me that I’d read the book! D’oh! I didn’t know going in that it was based on a Dennis Lahane novel, and that’s the only Dennis Lahane book I’ve read, but obviously I didn’t remember the title of the book.
I’m sure he did, but I’d have to see it again to see exactly where. I saw Reservation Road today too (another good movie) and that was fresher in my mind. I want to see GBG again anyway.
I saw this movie because I’ve heard nothing but good things . . . “Ben Affleck redeemed himself!” I went with my GF and her dad, and we were ready to walk out we thought it was so bad. And, I’m not generally too critical of movies, but this was a Grade A stink bomb.
I thought the plot was bad, the acting was bad . . . it seemed like they were making it up as they went along. I found the characters to be unbelievable. I absolutely did not believe Casey Affleck as a private eye who “knew the streets,” and thought that his private eye business he ran with his girlfriend to be a silly premise. Any time he has to assert himself as a “bad ass,” I wanted to laugh.
Remember the scene in Good Will Hunting when Matt Damon shows up the college kid by saying, “how about them apples?” The script of “Gone Baby Gone” seems like it was written to have each exchange end in some clever quip like that . . . the characters have nonstop monologues about saving children or about the harsh realities of life, but it’s all written really poorly and is almost laughable.
What the movie lacks in substance, it tries to make up for by tugging your emotional heartstrings through with religious imagery (showing that these no-nonsense blue collar Bostonians have their hearts in the right place), and through constant monologues about children and their safety.
All in all . . . if you want to see this movie, I recommend seeing a different one in the theater and renting this one.
To each his own…I thought Affleck played the bad-ass just right…because he wasn’t a bad ass. He’s a tough talker, and could go glare to glare with the people, but when the guns came out (and he wasn’t the first one to draw), he flinches and yells out. And when he finally is in a shoot out,
he freaks out about it afterward and basically says he can’t do it again.Remember, he isn’t a “hard-boiled private eye;” he’s a local guy who looks for teenage runaways and people who owe money. I also didn’t see the quips you were talking about…not at all. So, agree to disagree.
I must be nuts. The hundreds of other movies I see every year must be causing confusion in my brain. I saw this last week, and thought it was a remarkable piece of work, solidly written (a very smart distillation of a complicated book), marvelously conceived and designed, very professionally shot and edited, brilliantly paced, and spectacularly well acted from top to bottom.
But then I read your post, and I realize that I must not know anything about movies. Thanks for showing all of us the light.
More specifically, what shocked Kenzie is the realization of the why Remy lied. If it were an inconsequential lie, then why lie about it? If this lie were a significant lie why was this lie important?
I liked it pretty well. I thought Casey Afflecks’s performance was just fine and I agree with ArizonaTeach that his character’s “badass-ery” was mostly a front. Something he had to do to get by and get any kind of respect in the neighborhood, and something he could mostly only do with a gun in his hand. I also think he had a streak of real hardness in him that came out occasionally and made him more fearless at times. Like when his girlfriend was threatened in the bar, for instance.
I thought the plot was a little more twisty than it needed to be did ALL the good guys really have to be bad guys?, and it followed one of thje most predictable movie laws ever If there isn’t a body, the character is never really dead, but I thought the moral dilemma at the end was an intriguing one, not easily answered, but the more I thought about, the more I think I would have done what Patrick did. As problematic as that choice might turn out to be, I still don’t think I would ever be able to feel right about choosing the alternative.
This is one of the better movies I have seen this year. And they didn’t do the traditional “happy” ending.
I hope people realize that Kenzie is a conflicted character. He changes. He grows. After shooting the pedophile, he realizes how easy it is to justify doing wrong and even says he wouldn’t do it again if he had a chance, although people not only condoned what he did, but congratulated him on it. Madeleine was his chance to do it over again.
I liked this movie. I could go over the motivations of each and every character if you wish. I was literally sitting on the edge of my seat - a rarity. If you found the story confusing - it was. Life is like that. People do things and we shake our heads and later we hear the rest of the story and go “Aha!”. Like when we hear Dumbledore was gay and then :smack: now we more clearly understand why he abandoned his family to go off gallivanting with Gellert Grindelwald.
I thought it was pretty solid, and both Afflecks did outstanding work. I could have used a little more of Angie, Michelle Monaghan’s character, though. In the end, I was less affected by their split because the two of them never really seemed to have a strong connection. I thought her character was underused, generally, and that flaw showed up most clearly in the relationship between the two of them.
They didn’t have a strong connection because they weren’t right for each other. It took this huge moral dilemma to bring that out. I hated her at the end, because even though I understood her point of view, I thought she should have understood HIS point of view, and respected him for his moral compass, no matter how much she disagreed.
I was really impressed by both Afflecks. Ben had some beautiful images and clever moments but didn’t get too showy.
Casey managed to come across as a neighborhood kid who has been around enough to know how to handle himself but didn’t seem to much like a junior Rambo.
I found the central conspiracy unbelievable, particularly the way good men with good intentions ended up committing multiple murders. But that was more than balanced by the ethical question Casey faced at the end. Very thought-provoking.
