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Well, it's official -- Ben Affleck is a director, not an actor. Oops. Turns out Casey's the actor. At least they figured this out in time to make a good movie. Not gonna lie, I've already forgotten the names of every character except for Ed Harris' Remy, because people keep shouting or saying "Remy" all through this thing, so I guess it's not a film that changed my life, but it sure as hell was worth seeing.

Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan are a pair of young private detectives assigned to help find a missing little girl by the girl's aunt, as her mother is a worthless drunken bitch. Morgan Freeman is the captain of the local department who lost his own child and has made a promise to himself never to let other parents go through what he did, and Ed Harris is the head detective on the case with partner John Ashton.

As Casey's from the neighborhood (Baahston) and knows people who don't talk to police, his help comes from knowing who to talk to and how to talk to them. While Monaghan is a great actress, her character really is nothing much more than the tagalong chick who's there to look at in case you grow bored with any particular scene. It's almost awkward if you stop and think "What the hell is she doing here?," but the movie moves enough to keep you from pondering such little things, as you're really more involved with the bigger picture of whether or not they'll find the little girl, although the film's main weakness is that we never know the little girl and can only care because it's a little girl and, hey, nobody wants to see anything too fucked up happen to a little girl.

A false ending happens halfway through the film, one comes so smoothly that you feel cheated for how short the movie was and yet impressed for how organic everything unfolded, but then things get complicated. This is when the flick's strongest and weakest aspects are revealed. While the REAL hunt for an ending brings out some creeps and creepiness that get your blood going just fine, the plot becomes so obsessed with twists and turns that it ends up suffering a tad from the same distractions "Mystic River" did (also based on a book by the same author as this one).

What this one has that "Mystic" lacked is a result that at least does make one think about the layers under a crime, as sometimes there are indeed a few shades of gray between black and white, and Casey's character is convincing enough to where we do care that he learns that. The film starts off with his narration of "I used to think it was the things we can't control that made us who we are" as it shows us (and quite well) his neighborhood, where he says people look at where they're from as an "accomplishment," and ends off with no narrative voice, just an audience to take from this what they will. Gasp! Someone gave an audience credit? The same guy who starred in "Pearl Harbor"? Thanks, Ben. You're on your way to saving your soul after all.

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