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Spoiler Points for Gone Baby Gone (2007) [R] 114 minutes
WIP™ Scale: $14.00
Film's Official Website • Film's Trailer
Click to read the non-spoiler review
Lite Spoils:
• Helene McCready (Amy Ryan) was not as forthcoming with the police as she should have been. Turns out that she left out a pretty important detail in her life. Turns out that she and her pal got the brilliant idea to steal $130,000 from their drug lord, Cheese (Edi Gathegi). They figured he'd assume the police confiscated the money, and instead, Helene buried it in her sidekick's back yard.
• When Patrick (Casey Affleck) and Angie (Michelle Monaghan) discover this, they assume that Cheese has Amanda and is holding her for ransom to get his money back.
• Only, Cheese doesn't actually know that his money is missing and he doesn't know anything about the girl's whereabouts, or so he claims pretty convincingly.
• Patrick and Angie are led to believe they messed up and failed to recover Amanda McCready from Cheese.
• The next day, a call from Cheese, however, sets up a meeting in near a quarry, where there is to be an exchange between the police and Cheese—the money for the girl.
• Things go bad, and Amanda accidentally falls into the Quarry, or so they think. Actually, they're not sure what happened, but Cheese is dead and Amanda is nowhere to be found.
• The whole thing stinks, but Patrick cannot figure out exactly why.
• A drug dealer kingpin friend of Patrick's calls him with a hot tip. Some people suspected originally of abducting Amanda have been found as they are buying cocaine from him. Patrick goes along on a visit and sees the purported child molester with a St. Christopher's medal around his wrist exactly like the one a young boy was wearing when he was recently abducted. This is enough for police detectives Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton) to break into the house and attempt to rescue the boy. This too goes badly with Poole getting shot, and Patrick Kenzie having to step in and save the day. He ends up killing the child molester causing him grave moral dilemmas. He knows what he did was wrong and that he could have captured the criminal without killing him.
• It will be a conversation regarding his feelings about this killing with Detective Bressard, however, that will unlock the final mystery.
• Clues will suddenly come together allowing Patrick to realize that he and Angie were set up.
• It was actually Remy and Amanda's uncle Lionel that kidnapped Amanda. And, they did so it seems because they wanted to get their hands on Helene's $130,000. Or so that seemed to be their motivation.
• When Lionel comes clean to Patrick, Remy shows up in a mask to shoot them both. Turns out that he and Lionel are hiding an even bigger secret.
Big Spoils and the Ending:
• Unbelievably, Amanda is alive. They faked her death and her kidnapping all along so that she could be 'rescued' in the arms of Police Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman) who had lost his own daughter years ago. Given that Amanda's mother was a severe drug addict, her uncle and the Captain could see no better plan to prevent her from turning out just like her mother—fake her abduction / death and move her to a new family.
• Patrick and Angie take a drive out to visit the Captain, and sure enough, there's Amanda happy as a clam. They could just turn and leave her there knowing she'd probably be better off than with her mother.
• Patrick, however, cannot live his life on the wrong side of being right. He knows everyone involved is probably right, that she'll be better off, but to convince oneself that the ends justify the means and that abducting a child from her rightful mother because you perceive her unfit and that you can provide a better life, represents the mad arrogance of tortured souls. So, he calls the state police to report that the abuduction of Amanda McCready has been solved.
• Did any good come of his moral decision? He loses Angie who disagrees with him on this action. Capt. Doyle ends up in prison. Remy ends up dead. And Amanda is back home in the household where her cracked up mother left her alone to be abducted in the first place.
•Patrick seems to realize that things are not going to go that well for Amanda, so he pops over to her house from time to time to check up on her. During his visit that's the last scene of the film, he gets roped into babysitting while Helene goes on a date with some guy who saw her on a television show about missing children and invited her on a date.
1 comment:
Thanks for a great read on gone-baby-gone. I half-watched it, and needed a little help. Take care...
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