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Rating:
Charlestown, Boston. One of the elite areas for bank and armored truck heists. Doug (Ben Affleck) and James (Jeremy Renner), longtime friends, are the leaders of a criminal gang that has been pulling off heists in the Charlestown neighborhood for quite some time. Organizing everything and obtaining information is the florist Fergus (the late Pete Postlethwaite). The gang proceeds with heist after heist, but one of the members breaks one of the cardinal rules of the trade: the Neil McCauley played by Robert De Niro in Michael Mann's Heat said, "If you want to do the robber's work, you can't have attachments or let anything enter your life that you can't disconnect from in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner." The mistake is letting into your life someone who shouldn't be there.
Ben Affleck navigates this double game, in fact gradually transforming what seemed like a full-fledged thriller into a film with even sentimental undertones. The woman in question is Claire (Rebecca Hall), an unwitting victim of a bank heist at the bank where she worked. A foreign body within that criminal world native to Charlestown, a neighborhood where those who are born there seem unable to abandon that "borderline" way of living, between drugs and rampant crime. Affleck does a good job of mixing the characters’ lives with that atmosphere of decay represented by the area and by a character like Krista (Blake Lively), Doug's mother and ex-girlfriend entangled in alcohol, drugs, and various troubles.
The Berkeley filmmaker manages to put together a visually solid film, well-balanced in its cinematic unfolding. Action scenes do not overshadow other sequences, which is why the spectacle never feels excessive or self-serving. The actors' performances are also very solid, with Jeremy Renner's edgy performance standing out, not surprisingly earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the 2011 edition.
What doesn’t fully convince in Affleck's film is the apparent nod to great films of the genre, as well as a certain superficiality regarding the investigative twists of the story, as if the protagonist's inner and sentimental aspect takes precedence over the rest of the plot.
"The Town" is an extremely solid film, well-directed with a good dose of craftsmanship. Affleck proves himself to be a good director, and the subsequent "Argo" confirms this. Better as a director than as an actor, one might say. Dear Ben invents nothing, he relies on a story suitable for the big screen (inspired by the novel "Prince of Thieves" by Chuck Hogan), on a classic style and a reliable cast. Almost two hours of good cinema.
Three and a half stars.
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