Review of Gone Baby Gone (2007) by Dawdlingpoet — 24 Nov 2021

This is really quite a gritty movie, its not at all glamourised and it provides a quite bleak and dark look at Americas criminal underworld and it also might make you question what you see on the surface of things, what people may be hiding.

All is most certainly not as it seems, I think thats about all I can say really without wanting to give too much away, it could go either way of course but I won't be ruining the movie by giving away the plot to explain things too well, that wouldn't make for a good review, more that would be one to avoid unless you'd already seen the movie but I think it is safe to say that it should make you think and that there are alot of twists in the movie. When you might think that you've got a good idea of whats happened, it turns out that actually the opposite was the case. The story is really quite complicated, with a few characters having quite inventive names, or more nicknames, such as Cheese and Bubba and I did find it quite difficult to keep up with the intricacies of the plot and who was what and who did what and all of that, so it is quite a complicated story. It also didn't help that there were problems with the sound suddenly getting quite low as well, the main character of Patrick did seem to mumble a bit and with the street names used, it is a bit difficult to fully follow it for us Brits I think, or thats how I felt anyway.

I can't do a review on this movie without warning that there is an awful lot of heavy/strong language in this movie, as well as a fair bit of violence, with one particular gunshot scene that I thought was particularly graphic, so I certainly wouldn't recommend this movie be watched by children of course but neither by young teenagers either, had there been any stronger drug scenes (there were only perhaps a couple of scenes that basically just suggested heavy drug use but no strong graphic scenes of actual drug taking), I'd be thinking an 18 rating would be more appropriate, given the fact the controversial 'c' word is used more than once, which I don't tend to hear in 15 rated movies, so it is definitely gritty and not at all sugar coated.

The movie also I think shines a bit of a light onto what you could call the degradation of some working class families I suppose and in that sense it is quite depressing but again, I don't feel I can say too much about that without giving too much away. Certainly there are those who seriously want Amanda back, there are others who really care about her and Patrick gets more involved with the investigation the more they discover, he puts his life on the line to get to the bottom of whats happened and what he finds is quite, controversial I suppose you could call it. Its the sort of movie that you could, or should even, walk away from wondering, if I were the PI in that case and I found what he found, what would I have done? what is the right thing to do, given all the facts? its a pretty tough decision. Again this isn't to say that Amanda is found alive, or that she's found dead, you'll have to watch it to find out, all possibilities are shown to be the case at one point or another in the movie, which just adds even further to how complicated the story is as it moves on really. I guess it really is a movie where you have to see it to understand and I apologise if I have given too much away but I don't think I have. Like I've mentioned, if you think you know whats gone on, there is a good twist or two in the movie which should take you by surprise and you may well find yourself being shown otherwise.