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The Town

USA 2010
Directed by
Ben Affleck
125 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
Bruce Paterson
3.5 stars

The Town

Synopsis: Ben Affleck directs and stars as a bank robber struggling to escape his upbringing, complicated by getting involved in the life of one of his victims after a heist and falling out with his best mate, fellow robber James (Jeremy Renner).

Ben Affleck’s life lessons from his successes and failures, a rise and a fall that rose again with Gone Baby Gone (2007), show through in his dogged and credible efforts in The Town. In front of the camera, he is bank robber Doug Macray, a man for whom love and pain clearly run deep. Doug heads a small band of pals from Charlestown, a Boston suburb that allegedly raised a slew of American bank robbers, as they commit a series of robberies with dangerous consequences.

While Doug tries to play it safe, he contends with the increasingly trigger-happy James (Jeremy Renner) who always brings an assault rifle to a pistol fight. The crew robs banks in a variety of elaborate disguises and rubber masks (given the current hysteria about bandits in burqas, nuns’ habits should clearly be next on the public blacklist). James departs from the plan when he takes as a hostage bank manager Claire (Rebecca Hall), who is understandably traumatized. Trying to straighten things out, Doug “accidentally” bumps into her later in order to start a friendship and find out if she saw anything under the masks. This complicates things.

Behind the camera, Affleck is adept with the slow cadences of the film as well as the frenetic car chases and shootouts. The mixed pacing draws you into the physicality and emotion of the story. Unfortunately, the wheels fall off in the last 60 seconds with a forced landing into sentimentality, but this is relatively easy to forgive. The strength of the story remains the evolving friendship between Doug and Claire, against which some other scenes can seem slightly overblown.  Two minor roles provide much of the film’s cachet, the eerily compelling performances of the frightening florist crime lord (Pete Postlethwaite), and Doug’s imprisoned father (Chris Cooper). The downside is the artful environmental sound design which seems to muffle quite a bit of the dialogue.

The Town is familiar territory, recalling the masks of Point Break (1991), the Irish rumble-tumble of The Departed (2006), and the similarly themed Heat (1995). But it is far more serious than the first, less overblown than the second, and simpler and more humane than the third. Worth a look, if not quite worth the world's adulation.

 

 

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