Changeling

Clint Eastwood returns to the director's chair with a tale about a missing boy in 1928, and the mother who would not accept the boy whom the LAPD tried to pawn off as her son 5 months later. In this time period, the LAPD's leadership was rife with corruption and bullied anyone who tried to shine the light of justice on them. Angeline Jolie plays Christine Collins, the mother, who gets to sample the LAPD's menu of coercive tactics to get her off her mission to get the LAPD to renew their efforts to find her son. Jolie is solid as Christine, though she isn't really called upon to do much in the mid-section, besides looking concerned and anxious. She comes across as a bit unhinged, but only because the screenplay has her repeating lines over and over and over and over again, to the detriment of the emotional power in her words.

The screenplay by J. Michael Straczynski feels bloated, as the pacing felt a little too slow (for a 140 minute film), and I thought it could be tightened up a bit with the story it was trying to tell, even though it does not even dwell much on a possible suspect's past (motivation-wise) for the abduction of Christine's son, while giving us a truly off-kilter suspect to deal with for the remainder of the film, while the LAPD is confronted with public outcry over many of their tactics and overall demeanor in "protecting" the citizenry.

I give it 2.75 stars, or a grade of B-.