The Town (2010)

I was very impressed with Ben Affleck’s The Town (2010), a slick, hard-hitting crime thriller about a crew of bank robbers and armored car thieves from Boston’s infamous Charlestown neighborhood, of which we are solemnly informed at the film’s outset, “has produced more bank robbers and armored car thieves than any place in the world.”

Affleck plays Doug MacRay, the leader of the group, who’s responsible for planning and researching the robberies they commit. After robbing a bank in the film’s opening, Jim Coughlin (in a chilling performance by Jeremy Renner), the group’s hothead and best friend to Doug, is concerned about a witness who might be able to identify them. He wants to threaten and if necessary, eliminate her. Doug however, wary of Jim’s violent tendencies, volunteers to keep an eye on her. After meeting her at a laundromat, Doug finds himself falling for that same witness, an attractive assistant bank manager named Claire Keesey (played by Rebecca Hall) who strangely enough, develops an attraction to him as well. Thus one of the film’s central conflicts is set up, how does Doug maintain what is quickly growing into a budding romance with the one witness who can finger them, while keeping the sociopathic Jim from trying to kill her?

Any decent film about bank robbers wouldn’t be worth its salt without a decent antagonist from the FBI, and we get one in Special Agent Frawley, (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm) who engages in the usual tactics of the Bureau, targeting the weakest of the herd to drop the dime on the group’s latest and greatest caper before they can get away with it.  Veterans like the late Pete Postlethwaite and Chris Cooper give great performances, although it’s funny listening to Cooper try to mimic that Boston hard r with his Texas accent.

All in all, Affleck displays great chops in directing The Town and gives a great performance onscreen as well. I think I tend to prefer him in these more ethnic films, like Good Will Hunting (1997), or directing Gone Baby Gone (2007). I definitely look forward to seeing him do more.