Even with the incredibly gritty Gone Baby Gone under his directorial belt, I don’t think anyone was expecting Ben Affleck’s next filmmaking effort to take a serious potshot at usurping the stranglehold Michael Mann’s Heat has on the heist epic. And yet, as he ventured once more into his hometown of Boston to deliver drawling crime flick, The Town, the man who once was ridiculed for the animal cracker scene from Armageddon, and virtually everything that happened during Gigli, went and cemented himself as a serious force to contend with in his new phase in only his sophomore film.
While The Town does bow to the alter of Mann a couple of times (steely career criminal waylaid by love, concrete searing shootouts), it still bears the mark of its director who managed to craft a truly great Boston thriller, presumably while Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg were looking the other way…
If an opening title card is to be believed, Charlestown, Boston has produced more bank and armored car robbers within one square mile than anywhere in the U.S., and it immediately makes good on this bold statement by introducing us to one such slick operation. Led and planned by thoughtful, ex-alcoholic Doug MacRay and flanked by his volatile childhood friend, James “Jem” Coughlin, the team is further rounded put by Albert MacGloan and Desmond Elden and we immediately get a sense of their balls (so to speak) as we watch them rob a bank with scary looking machine guns. Ever the professional, MacRay keeps things smooth while Jem is happy to beat on the Assistant Manager, but breaking from the plan, the group take Bank Manager Claire Keesey hostage only to let her go once they’re free and clear.
However, matters start to get a mite tangled when both Doug and Jem soon discover that Claire actually lives barely four blocks from them and soon start to worry if she could one day identity them despite the rubber skull masks they were wearing. Jem, unsurprisingly, is all for taking her off the board as he has no desire to taste jail once again, but to calm things down, Doug volunteers to keep an eye on her to see what’s what.
Of course, Doug isn’t planning to both end up meeting Claire and then have them both fall for one another, but that’s exactly what happens which tends to add noticable stress points to both their lives. Not only is Jem pissed that Doug is in love with a witness who could send them all to prison, but terrifying, flower arranging, local Irish crime boss Fergus Colm isn’t best pleased to hear that Doug is planning to quit his lucrative life of crime for his lady love. But on the other side, determined FBI Special Agent Adam Frawley is trying to ease out any information Claire has on her ordeal – can Doug keep Jem on a leash, keep pulling jobs and dodge the FBI in order to secure a happy ending?
While Ben Affleck’s second outing as a director may rob the crime movie trope Vault at gunpoint a fair few times, it’s good to see that the future Batman has his own vision at the forefront of The Town, despite borrowing more than a couple of stock plot points. However, while a fair amount of The Town could be considered repurposed property, Affleck endures that the tone and feel of the film is very different to the sheeny gloss of Heat or the self-aware zip of a Tarantino clone. While he’s well aware that a good heist flick needs knuckle-gnawing robberies to spice up the runtime, Affleck also knows that if we don’t actually care about any of the people involved, it’ll all just be another empty exercise in macho posturing – thus a major artery that throbs throughout The Town is the unlikely connection that occurs when a robber falls for a former hostage while desperately trying to keep his lives apart.
However, the main proof of The Town quality is that while many of the plot points should be making your eyeballs roll, Affleck somehow manages to make a lot of well-worn roads feel fresh when a lesser filmmaker might have lapsed into hokiness or just plain melodrama. For a start, if Affleck had played this unlikely nice robber ten years ago, he probably would have been laughed off the screen, but despite the fact that he’s a genuine, caring guy with past trauma who can actually articulate his feelings with a woman, he makes this “nice guy/crook” act actually work impressively well despite the fact that he has to come across as caring with a Boston accent. Similarly, Rebecca Hall manages to ground what could be a rather convoluted romance with aplomb as the movie adds unshowy moments of tension as Doug feels his two worlds growing uncomfortably close.
However, as good as Affleck is as actor and director, he isn’t anywhere near good enough to prevent the most audacious heist of all being performed by Jeremy Renner, who all but steals the movie right out from under the noses of his fellow cast mates by play the token psycho of the group. The bristling, but loyal nutjob of the gang is yet another well worn trope of crime movies, but again The Town delivers a variation of this that succeeds in feeling like its very own thing. While we spend most of the time waiting for the charismatic lunatic to inevitably go too far in these types of things, both Affleck, Hall and Renner manage to generate palpable anxiety as the more unpredictable corner of this triangle is hidden from the other two.
Rounding out the core characters is Jon Hamm’s FBI agent who – to no great surprise – proves to be just a ruthless and calculating as the crooks, but again he manages to find original and memorable hand holds to present something slightly adjacent to the norm. There’s a complaint to be made that the other two members if the gang are sort of surplus to requirements dramatically speaking, but it’s tough to pick holes when the cast also offers up Blake Lively in noticably trashy form as Jem’s sister and Doug’s ex and we even get Pete Postlethwaite with an Irish accent delivering a legitimately terrifying mob boss that manages to rival even Renner with a fraction of the screen time.
Of course, you can’t have a modern crime epic that forms a symbiotic relationship with the city it’s in without some blistering heists. But while The Town isn’t quite up to the insurmountable task of bettering or even equalling the iconic gun battles of Heat, Affleck manages to find many unique touches that grants the action its own, vital identity. A cop who spots the gang clad in nun masks and cradling weapons as they change vehicles draws nervous laughter from the audience as he wisely elects to simply look the other way – but to do the same with The Town would easily be a mistake.
Affleck doubles down and proves that Gone Baby Gone wasn’t a fluke thanks to a merging of gunfire and the broad vowels of the Bostonian accent. But while his epic veers a little too closely to other, similar films that have come before, The Town manages to find some surprising and interesting leverage from ditching tough guy tropes and goes to town on embracing a more heartfelt attitude.
Boston illegal.
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