nan | 楠木

Gone Baby Gone is a surprisingly sharp thriller directed by Ben Affleck and starring Casey Affleck, Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman.

Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) is a private investigator who has been hired to help investigate the kidnapping of a 3 year old girl named Amanda, who is the daughter of a drug addict Helene (Amy Ryan). The police are also involved, and they have their best men on the job: supervised by captain Jack Doyle (Freeman), head of the unit for child abductions, veteran detectives Remy Bressant (Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton) are in charge of the case.

But it’s Kenzie, the local man who knows his way around the rough neighborhood, who’s digging up most of the leads, and eventually leads the cops to a failed attempt to rescue the child. Amanda is believed to be dead, but Kenzie believes something’s not quite right…

As a thriller, the film successfully delivers 2-3 major plot twists, carefully laid out in the form of lies that Kenzie spotted (Kenzie’s motto being, if it’s big enough for somebody to lie to you, then something’s up). These twists keep the attention of the audience, and also make the film constantly evolving.

But what’s really smart about this film is the moral question it poses: if you had to make a choice between what’s morally just and what’s pragmatically good (you can’t have both), what would you choose? For me, like Kenzie, I would go with the morally just, but I fear that’s because I don’t want to live with a guilty conscience – for the other parties concerned, however, the pragmatically good choice may far be the more beneficial.

8/10