Blu-ray Review: Gone Baby Gone

THE MOVIE: 5 stars out of 5

You know you are watching a great movie when your are so captured by the narrative that the movie feels like it is over almost before it began. This is what I experienced with Gone Baby Gone, a gripping and compelling story about two young detectives hired by the relatives of a very young little girl who they believe to have been kidnapped by a child predator and there efforts to develop and track down leads about her whereabouts before it is too late. This movie features many unexpected twists and turns which I will not even hint at here so as to not spoil the movie for you. This film is wonderfully directed by Ben Affleck and stars his brother Casey and Michelle Monaghan as the two young Boston area detectives trying to track done the missing girl along with Ed Harris and the great Morgan Freeman as two police officers involved in the investigation. The writing, acting and directing in this film is excellent across the board. Highly recommended.

THE VIDEO: 4 1/2 stars out of 5

Encoded with AVC and presented in its original aspect ratio of 1:85:1, this is a fine looking transfer. It boasts excellent color rendition albeit somewhat subdued and deep blacks and presents a fine looking image overall. Detail was good but not great as was the case with shadow detail. Don’t get me wrong, the image did not look soft at all it just lacked some of the detail of the best looking transfers I have seen. I would not describe the image as being flat at all. In fact, it was quite three dimensional. I doubt that anyone would be unhappy with the look of the film as the somewhat subdued color palette was clearly intentional and fit the overall feel of the narrative. I just thought that the level of detail could have been a bit better.

THE AUDIO: 4 5/8 stars out of 5

Presented with an uncompressed PCM audio track at 48 kHz/24 bit, the audio quality on this release was excellent. Dialogue was rich and full and very natural sounding and well placed in the overall sound field. The overall sound of the film was smooth, open and dynamic with excellent bass reproduction. I also found the film to throw a very immersive sound field where appropriate such as in the interior shots and some night time exterior shots. The wonderful dynamics and fidelity of this audio encode was most apparent in the action scenes. The sound of the gun shots was very realistic and made you almost jump out of your seat. There is really very little to quibble about with the audio presentation on this release. Excellent stuff.

IN CONCLUSION

This is one excellent film with excellent acting and storytelling with very good audio and video although a tad short of reference quality. However, the film is so compelling, I doubt that many would even notice. Go out and get this film. HIghly recommended.

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