Eye Candy #97 - "Gone Baby Gone"

Gone Baby Gone: I will preface this review by saying that I'm a big fan of all of Dennis Lehane's Kenzie/Gennaro PI mysteries and that I've been excited since this was announced to see this film. The story of two detectives trying to find a missing 4 year old girl in the underbelly of Boston, "Gone Baby Gone" is everything you need a thriller to be - believable characters in extraordinary but not unbelievable situations that you actually give a crap about, murky grey moral areas, and enough violence to balance at the slow parts. And to top that all off, "Gone Baby Gone" successfully violates my 'thrillers should be 105 minutes or less to be effective' rule which most movies don't. Clocking in at just under 2 hours (and with at least 3 climaxes in the story), it's pretty darn hard to keep interest going, but this film managed to keep me up late so I could see how it ended. Performances across the board were solid, with Casey Affleck leading the pack. He's perfect for the part. Only acting gripe: the script gives Michelle Monaghan very little to do. It's a "Patrick Kenzie picture", not a "Kenzie/Gennaro picture". And that's unfortunate because Monaghan is a solid actress. Freeman and Ed Harris are both good in support. I do hope that because this film was so well received, they will adapt the other novels. They all tend to follow the same themes - drug dealers, pedophiles, murderers, scum of the earth, etc. that Lehane visits in most of his books (including the already filmed "Mystic River", which isn't one of the PI books). Not a particularly rosy picture of Boston, but there you go. Woodchuck sez, "Me likey. A lot."