Affleck debuts Gone Baby Gone

Our take: 4/5 Stars

Ben Affleck, just when I thought you couldn't get any dumber, you go and do something like this...

And totally redeem yourself!

But seriously, Dumb and Dumber quotes aside, Ben Affleck's directorial debut Gone Baby Gone is good enough to make you forget about his participation in duds like Daredevil and Gigli. He commands the film as though it is already second nature to him.

Like last year's winner-of-all-that-is-good The Departed, Gone Baby Gone takes place in Boston. Patrick (Casey Affleck), along with his girlfriend Angie (Michelle Monaghan), is a private investigator who is hired by the family of a young girl who has gone missing. Patrick has strong ties with the neighborhood locals, and thus an advantage over the regular police when it comes to obtaining information. But the more Patrick discovers, the less he understands, and what constitutes morality takes hold as the central theme.

So on paper, Gone Baby Gone looks just like an old-fashioned detective story, and in a way, it is. It doesn't do anything gimmicky or flashy; it just tells a straightforward narrative.

On the other hand, it is within the story itself that the film gains its complexity. Predictability of the outcome is low because so few clues are given to help the audience in solving the mystery before the characters do.

For example, at one point I had thought everything was figured out; the case was closed, done and done. In reality, we were only halfway through the movie, and twists aplenty lay ahead. But not the ridiculous, out-of-this-world kind of twists that leave you rolling your eyes. No, these are the good kinds of twists that you hope for in these kinds of stories.

This particular story happens to be based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. This isn't the first time one of Lehane's novels has made it to the big screen; in 2003, Clint Eastwood directed the film adaptation of Mystic River. Both Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone seem to owe a lot to their original works because both tell such engaging stories.

As mentioned before, this is Ben Affleck's first outing as director, yet he avoids mistakes one might expect from a newbie. In fact, his style seems polished, professional and low-key. He doesn't appear desperate to overdo anything just to make a name for himself; he plays it cool and straightforward, and it works out for the best.

Ben's younger brother Casey stars as Boston native Patrick. Casey is likely best remembered as one of Ocean's eleven men (from Ocean's Eleven) that got less screen time than the big names like Clooney and Pitt. Here, he gets to be the leading man (the Ocean, if you will), and he does an excellent job. His quiet, confident demeanor and jaded look gives him the credibility of someone who has walked the streets of Boston his whole life.

Ed Harris provides another standout performance as Detective Remy Bressant. Harris already proved he could play a scary guy in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, and here he is able to recreate that by becoming a man whose motives we're never really sure of.

I can't readily come up with very many problems with the movie. The pacing can be a bit slow at times, and the story is like the detective stories from the days of yore, so it isn't ground-breaking. But when the story is as engrossing as this, it doesn't need to try and redefine its genre. The film never pretends to be more than it is.

Hats off to you, Affleck brothers.