Ben Affleck, with the making of his first film, falls into a modern pitfall normally reserved for great filmmaking icons such as Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone or Steven Spielberg: he does not see fit to edit his film. Instead, he includes all the deleted scenes and superfluous bits of nothing that should have been reserved for the future DVD's bonus materials.

Gone Baby Gone is a noble idea, and had great potential. To put the morality of vanishing children & extenuating circumstance under the microscope is a damn good concept, and a subject worth exploring. But

a bit too complex, perhaps, for a first-time filmmaker. Or too complex for this particular filmmaker's first foray.

Affleck calls in a smorgasbord of industry buddies and has a really solid cast, but the script and the performances of Freeman & Harris are conspicuously flat. Dialogue seems to go on for pages that drives the narrative in no way, and is often repeated in the following scene with another character.