Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Gone Baby Gone

Called in by the family of a missing girl to augment the official police investigation, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) use their experience of growing up in the area of Boston where Angela McCready (Madeline O’Brien) went missing to winkle out some leads. Soon they’re working as equals with the detectives assigned to the case by Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), but when one of those detectives is a self-confessed by-any-means-necessary rule-breaker like Detective Remy Bressant (Ed Harris), that’s not necessarily a cause for celebration. Drawn deeper and deeper into a web of drug-dealing, abduction and double-cross, at the heart of which lies the missing girl’s mother, Helene (Amy Ryan), Patrick and Angie find themselves compromised at every turn. Postponed on this side of the pond from its original release schedule last year as a result of the disappearance of Madeline McCann, Gone Baby Gone (based on the best-selling novel by Dennis Lehane) is a bleak and hard-hitting tale of moral corruption on the mean streets of Boston. Strong performances from an excellent cast give the story a gritty authenticity that is at times almost too real to bear, particularly in terms of the police department’s pessimistic outlook on the chances of finding young Angela. Casey Affleck, building on his superb turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is the star of the show, although Harris – who looks eerily like Dennis Hopper – matches him with a chilling portrayal of slow-burning intensity. Ben Affleck, who also co-adapted the novel, directs with no little style in his debut at the helm, slicing out the fat and leaving us with a lean, taut tale. By the finale the character of Patrick Kenzie is a little too squeaky-clean to ring entirely true, but this is a compelling and disturbing movie nonetheless. **** - Declan Burke

This review first appeared in TV Now! magazine

More O’Irish Than The O’Irish Themselves

Bandwagon-jumping being about the only exercise the CAP elves get these days, they were visibly palpitating with joy when The Elf They Call Karlos announced, via CNN, that Martin Scorsese has signed on to film Dennis Lehane’s (right) SHUTTER ISLAND with Leonardo DiCaprio in talks to assume eye-candy duties. This, of course, coming on top of Ben Affleck’s brilliant* take on GONE BABY GONE, which is currently burning up a silver screen near you. So why are the elves launching themselves headlong at that runaway bandwagon? Quoth the CNN wallahs:

[Lehane’s] talent is not, he insists, originality of plot, going so far as to say his plots “could be found on an episode of CSI or LAW & ORDER. He’s merely happy to take credit for doing what he does very well, which is to write meaty, morally ambiguous, thought-provoking crime novels centred in the seamiest parts of Boston. No, his explanation for his success is simpler: pure luck. “I am just the luckiest guy on the planet,” he says. (If you suspect he used a more colourful word than ‘guy’, you’re right.) “Because I’m Irish, I keep looking at the sky, waiting for it to fall.”

So, the Big Question: is Crime Always Pays entitled to claim Dennis Lehane as an Irish crime writer now that he’s damned to Hollywood fame? Stick your answers where the sun don’t sign, people.**

* Yeah, we know. Ben frickin Affleck. Who’d a thunk it?
** Erm, that’ll be the comment box, obviously.