DANGER: SPOILERS AHEAD

"Gone Baby Gone" is a morality tale, virtually certain never to occur in real life, written and directed by Ben Affleck, starring his brother Casey Affleck, that takes place in their home town of Boston.

The entire film is meant to make us ruminate on whether or not a bad parent, Helene McCready (Amy Ryan), should have her child taken away from her based on the fact that somebody else could raise the little girl better. Actually, I didn't ruminate on this question very much at all. The answer is simply this: yes. In a strictly objective sense, Helene's little girl should be taken away from her if another, willing parent, is around to do a better job. In this case, a much better job. Helene is a shitty mother. She's like a two on a scale of one to ten. She's a drug addict and drug runner. She can't even take care of herself. Contrary to what this film thinks and what people think in general: parenthood is not a sacred right. Just because you can have kids doesn't mean you should. That's the question someone should ask: what should we do with unqualified parental fuckwits?

Sadly, I'm getting ahead of myself and spoiling the film, but so what? My job is to discuss the film, not tip toe around its plot machinations. "Gone Baby Gone" starts with a disappearance. Helene's little girl goes missing and there's this big hullabaloo surrounding it. Because her brother Lionel (Titus Welliver) and sister-in-law Bea (Amy Madigan) aren't sure whether Helene lost the kid, the kid was kidnapped, or whatever, they hire on private investigators Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) because they know the neighborhood and the people. Patrick and Angie are lovers and colleagues, which seems like one of the film's many contrivances since most reasonable people know that if you worked with your significant other and never got a break from them, you'd stab yourself in the groin after a week or less. Patrick and Angie kind of get what they deserve in that regard - discovering a disagreement that leads to the dissolution of their union. You know, if you spend that much time with another person, you're eventually going to be tearing each other's eyes out over who's taking the longer shower.

To sort of get to the meat of this whole thing: Patrick and Angie discover what a completely shitty parent Helene has been, coming to believe that her daughter was killed in a botched money/drug exchange. However, as Patrick works with the cops, including Det. Remy Bressant (Ed Harris), Det. Nick Poole (John Ashton) and Capt. Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), he discovers more sinister dealings afoot.

MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!!

Basically, Bressant, Doyle, along with Lionel McCready (Titus Welliver), Helene's brother, have conspired to kidnap the little girl and make it look like she's dead. The reason? Because Doyle can raise the girl far better than Helene and he wants to. Sounds good to me.

Ultimately, I'm not sure what the point of the film is. I suppose it might be an argument that the state should never have the right to take a child away from its mother. But what if the mother is a heroine addict and a child abuser? Since we all know what a good job the state does of raising children, is it really a moral dilemma that a doting police captain would kidnap the child in order to give her a good life? I don't think so.

Imagined conflict really isn't conflict and "Gone Baby Gone" really isn't a film.