The Town

It seems like only yesterday Ben Affleck was kryptonite for a movie. If you put him in your film, it would fail, but not only would it fail, it would be panned mercilessly. I always felt like he got a bad rap because of his relationship with Jennifer Lopez. He was the ultimate victim of this idea of celebrity overwhelming the work. Go back and watch some of those movies and you will see they are not the worst movies ever made. Affleck did a smart thing after that. he took a supporting role in HollywoodLand and then he co-wrote and directed the absolutely stunning Gone Baby Gone. His eye and ear for detail in the mean street of Boston coupled with this excellent story of moral ambiguity mixed with a wonderful set of performances revitalized Affleck's career and took it in a completely different direction. Of course the first questions asked about The Town, from inside my brain, were all about whether Gone Baby Gone was a fluke, a one off perfect storm that caused Affleck to succeed. Would The Town realize my fears, or brush them aside?

Charlestown, Ma, a small blue collar town just outside of Boston is the bank heist capital of the United States. They are big on car jacking and muggings as well. it is a place for people with no real future and who are doing anything to scratch out a living. Doug(Affleck) and James(Jeremy Renner) are life long best friends who were raised on these mean streets and they run a four man crew of bank robbers. On one of their jobs, James gets out of hand and they briefly take a hostage, Claire(Rebecca Hall) and worried that she will cause problems, James wants her offed. Doug does not want murder on his hands, so he says he will watch her, but he does more than watch her. He falls for her. With the F.B.I, led by Agent Frawley, on their heels, Doug wants to take some time before their next project, but James is a hot head and Doug owes him, but when things go terribly wrong, Doug wants out. He wants Claire to go with him and he wants to find a way to start fresh away from the old neighborhood. Agent Frawley will do anything he can to put a stop to as much of this serial bank robbery as possible, but can he catch these guys?

The Town is a tight, intense and raw film starting to solidify Ben Affleck's career as a big time director. His acting is good, serviceable, if a little lackluster when compared to Jeremy Renner, but the pacing of the film is excellent and his confidence as a director shines through. He is not afraid to establish the world in which we are immersed. If the characters are a bit flat and the relationships a bit rushed, it can be forgiven because he establishes the world with these great B-roll shots of a broken, beaten little offshoot of Boston. The dialogue is incredibly blue-collar and filthy and the accents are all very hard. Everyone is just a bit dirty and there is a whole layer of filth covering everything. We understand the world from the on-screen text, but Affleck does not let the text do all fo the work, he works hard for us to understand why these characters feel trapped the way they do.

Aside from that work, Affleck gets great performances out of everybody, including Blake Lively, who has limited screen time, but makes the most of it. She is believable, makes interesting choices and overall made an impression on me. She is probably capable of more than just playing rich snobby girls on The CW. Jon Hamm has the thankless task of playing the "cop" role. It is a role that is so often thrown away in films like this, but Hamm is a presence! He has real star power and he delivers Ferocious lines with juicy intensity, including the most hardened line in the screenplay that will leave you in between a giggle and shock. However, Jeremy Renner is the star of this show. In The Hurt Locker, Renner had a tightly wound intensity, but here he lets loose and goes for it. His accent, line delivery, mannerisms and just the way he carries himself, you never once question whether or not he will go crazy, it is just a matter of when.

One of the most brilliant moments in this film comes at a cafe. It starts as a fairly innocent scene, an almost cute scene and by injecting Renner's character into it, the entire scene flips and Affleck brilliantly handles the scene shift and the pacing of the scene and the editing of the scene all change at exactly the right time. Of course, this scene is not what everyone is going to be talking about, but it was this scene that made me a full believer in the picture. That is not to say the big action sequences are not great because they are. The opening bank heist is a wonderful introduction into what kind of movie we are watching. Full of quick cuts, striking violence and this gritty realism Affleck exudes, the opening Heist really captures the audience, but if the rest of the film had been mishandled, it would not have been so impressive.

To say The Town borrows from Michael Mann's Heat may be obvious, but Affleck does not just copy it, he makes it his own. Yes, he was clearly influenced by it, but I have seen many movies with big shoot outs clearly inspired by Michael Mann, including other Michael Mann movies, that were not successful. The final shoot out in this, though, is incredibly successful. The bullets sounds like they are whizzing by your head and they pop with such violence that you cringe and bullets fly like the world is running out of them and they all need to be shot off to save the world. When you think the shoot out is over and then it spills out into the world, then it gets even more intense for a few seconds. You actually wonder who will live and who will die and I like when a movie can do that.

Really great intense movies do not come around all that often and The Town does the job. It is intense, for sure, but it also entertains. It is an edge of your seat cops and robbers story, where you are not entirely sure you know what you want to have happen to the characters. Affleck's attention to detail as a director overshadows his own performances and the love story might feel a bit shoe-horned and rushed, but there is so much to love about the movie that it can be forgiven. It is worth seeing for Renner's performance alone, but there is so much more to enjoy. From beginning to end, The Town succeeds!

Final Grade: A-

P.S. one of the best things about bank heist movies is seeing the masks and the masks in this one do not disappoint.