The Town
It’s all done well, especially considering just how much work Affleck put into this one feature, but The Town never quite pushes beyond its genre trappings.

“Charlestown”, the opening credits tell me, “is a blue collar neighbourhood of Boston.” A sweeping helicopter shot shows us a low-rise section of that city, and we’re informed that this ordinary looking place also moonlights as “the bank robbery capital of the world.”

From the word go you know what to expect from The Town, and the following account of a crook trying to go straight despite his environs is delivered confidently by writer-director-actor Ben Affleck. The action starts with a bank heist: a crack squad of masked thieves descend upon the employees of the establishment, and the manager Claire (Rebecca Hall) is coerced into opening the vault. Everything goes smoothly, until the maverick of the group James (Jeremy Renner, of Hurt Locker fame) lashes out violently and Claire surreptitiously sees his neck tattoo. The gang gets away and lets her go – but James demands that our hero, Doug MacRay, track her down and silence her, one way or another.

Though Doug masterminds the operation, he is at heart a good person – and luckily his interest in Claire as a person wins out over his more pragmatic side. When he follows her, he indirectly initiates a conversation with her. She is rattled by the bank raid, her emotions overwhelm her and she confides in him. The story then follows Doug as he struggles to negotiate a relationship with his victim whilst simultaneously avoiding the wrath of his coked-up, trigger happy best friend who would rather see her dead.

The Town is an ambitious film, but isn’t successful in every area one might wish. It’s not as original as Affleck seems to think it is: Martin Scorsese’s The Departed hangs rather heavy over the entire milieu – the rough Boston neighbourhoods, the corrupt locals with inventive ways of keeping frustrated hoodrats in line, the thick accents. The Town can’t really compete with the latter film, but it’s not a bad attempt at trying to present a difficult way of life sincerely.

Some more tangible flaws crop up as well: the camera often shifts out of focus during tight close-ups – and there are a lot of tight close-ups. The accents are at times almost unintelligible, thanks to the actors’ gusto for imitating the local way of speaking: at one point John Hamm (the FBI guy on the case) manages to verbally mangle the word ‘quarters’ into ‘quwoy-ay-tors’. All these authentic ‘Bwostwyn’ contortions mean that the nuances of dialogue get lost in a slightly muddy sound mix.

The story comes from Paul Hogan’s novel The Prince of Thieves, and as that title suggests, the characters tend to tack along predictable lines – of course, there’s the good thief and the bad thief. There are more egregious stock characters featured: there’s the blonde good-time girl Kriysta who wears push up bras, last night’s make-up, and an abundance of gold necklaces whilst accessorising them with a drug addiction and a baby girl (Blake Lively). In contrast, the ‘real’ love interest, Claire, is an elegantly beautiful brunette who happens to tend an allotment and volunteer with disadvantaged children. There may be a large doses of realism in these class-divided demographics, but the uncritical portrayal of them here lacks imagination. Doug bestows a diamond necklace on the brunette, shortly before he dumps the blonde by bellowing at her and shoving her about in front of Shine, her (and possibly his) daughter. The question of whether he fathered the child is conveniently left to one side, lest we begin to think he isn’t such a stand-up guy after all.

The Town does well when it isn’t trying too hard to be a serious crime drama in the Shawshank Redemption mould (the ending is a blatant ‘homage’ to that particular film), and gets on with the cat-and mouse thrills of stealing, driving cars very fast away from cops, and shouting about the hardships of prison life. It’s all done well, especially considering just how much work Affleck put into this one feature, but The Town never quite pushes beyond its genre trappings. It’s a good heist movie, with a strong sense of identity, but not much more than that.