The Town (2010)
- Directed by Ben Affleck
- Starring: Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, John Hamm, Blake Lively, Pete Postlethwaite

I hadn’t been to a movie theater in a while and I walked into The Town with high spirits and higher expectations. I had heard good things, and Jeremy Renner can get me to buy a $9 ticket. Twenty minutes into the film it became apparent that there would be predictable scenes at every turn. However, as I stuck with it, I became invested in the characters’ energy and passion. The Town could easily be brushed aside by snobbish reviewers as a montage of heist and chase clichés from films like Heat or The Departed. But it shouldn’t be. The Town puts a new, modern twist on an old story, one that I find exciting and highly entertaining. Why go to the movies if not to be entertained?
Ben Affleck directs and stars as Doug Macray, a rough-and-tumble kid from ‘the neighborhood’ of Charleston, a poor, trashy area of Boston. Accentuating its generally shady reputation, Charleston is also know as a haven for bank robbers who are mostly responsible for the 300 bank robberies a year in Boston. Doug runs a skilled gang of robbers that includes Jeremy Renner as the volatile James Coughlin. Renner gives an impassioned performance as a fiercely territorial badass who has already done time for his defense of his best friend Doug. Rebecca Hall and John Hamm, neither of whom I had ever seen before, both give solid performances. I was pleasantly surprised with Hamm’s character, an FBI agent, who seems hell-bent on bringing the gang to justice, morals and laws be damned. Blake Lively also gives a surprisingly effective performance as Doug’s on-and-off-again girlfriend, proving (to me at least) that she is more than just a Gossip Girl with a pretty face.
The basic plot of the film evolves out of a bank robbery in which Renner kidnaps a bank manager (Claire Keesey: Rebecca Hall). To alleviate James’ fears that she might be able to later identify them Doug begins to tail her and they ultimately end up meeting and falling in love. Naturally, when James discovers the relationship this produces tensions between the two childhood friends. These tensions are only exacerbated when Doug tries to escape his criminal life with Claire, resulting in a showdown between Doug and the Charleston crime boss Fergie Colm, played by Pete Postlethwaite. To be honest, I expected the scenes between Doug and his imprisoned father (played by Chris Cooper) to be the highlights of the movie, but Postlethwaite steals the whole goddamn show. He kills it as Fergie, who fronts as a skinny, aging florist while organizes the gang’s crimes. Postlethwaite, always a legend, radiates authority, confidence, and danger. At one point in the film, Doug, infuriated by Fergie’s refusal to let him out of a job, accompanied by threats on Claire’s life, threatens to kill Fergie. Without pausing his pruning, Fergie calmly tells a story about how he castrated Doug’s father for similar disobedience. While this is my personal favorite scene from the movie, the final half hour of the film is a tension-ridden series of shootouts and twists that will interest any audience.
Buried in all the action and excitement, Affleck cleverly sneaks in a pervading sense of hopelessness. This new age, gritty realism is what saves The Town from being just another bland action movie. Boston-born director Affleck lets the city flood into the movie, allowing the setting to tell a story on its own. At no point are the shootouts more interesting than when the van is weaving through narrow Boston alleys. One can only see so many chase and shootout scenes before they get boring and I felt that Affleck relied on them a bit much. Still, the modern feel of the weapons, body armor, technology, and even the comically frightening nun masks that the gang don give The Town a feeling of, for lack of a better word, believability. I liked the film, and I loved the performances by Hamm, the astounding Renner, and the legendary Postlethwaite. I would put it on par with The Italian Job but not as good as Inside Man or Heat. This is simply a fun movie done right. The action is not over the top, the characters are fresh and raw, and the movie flows well. Simply put, the movie is fun and entertaining, which is all I wanted it to be.

Score out of 10: 7.3