Review: The Town

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Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner in The Town

As The Town opens, a black screen with white quotes regarding the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown appears. This is "the town": the neighborhood of Charlestown in which, we are told, an extremely large percentage of armored truck/bank robbers reside.

Director/actor Ben Affleck's crime-romance movie follows two main storylines: bank robber Doug MacRay (Affleck) falling for bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) as he tries to keep her from discovering too much, and Jon Hamm's FBI Agent Frawley as he endeavors to capture Doug's gang. Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner plays Doug's hot-tempered pal and crime partner James "Jem" Coughlin, and Gossip Girl's Blake Lively plays Coughlin's drugged-up kid sister Krista. Throw in Chris Cooper as Doug's jailed father, Irish indie favorite Pete Postlethwaite as a sadistic florist/drug dealer, and Titus Welliver (The Good Wife) as Frawley's FBI partner and you have a pretty stellar cast.

The stellar cast and their performances draw the viewer into the story. The Town isn't a dismal film, though it deals with dark issues (drugs, murder, and more). Affleck's smooth direction and the screenplay (by Affleck, Peter Craig, and Aaron Stockard, based on a book by Chuck Hogan) have a lot to do with this. At the point in the movie when Claire says to Doug, "On sunny days, I always think of someone dying," the line seems portentious, yet Hall's delivery is far from maudlin. Claire and Doug's connection is almost palpable, and Affleck is able to pull off a true anti-hero with this role. Doug has done some bad things, but Affleck keeps the character likable and the audience pulling for him.

In comparison, Hamm's FBI agent Frawley is so determined to capture his quarry that he can be off-putting. Frawley could have been a one-note character in someone else's hands, but Hamm's portrayal makes the character multi-dimensional. The same could be said for Renner's Jem. Jem is the kind of guy who resorts to violence when other means might be preferable, but he can still be counted on in a pinch. With such varied characters for the guys to play, it's unfortunate that the roles for females in the film are so few; there are only two with sizeable roles, and the character of Krista Coughlin comes across as stereotypical and almost unnecessary. The screenplay is more to blame for that than Lively is.

Another slight downside to the The Town: there are times when the actors' speech is nigh indecipherable due to either the low volume of speaking or the attempted Boston accents. If I had been watching the movie at home, I would have turned on the closed captioning -- but that's not an option in the theater! I could only understand about half of what Blake Lively said because she tended to mumble as she slurred her lines. Maybe next time she can have a vocal coach?

Affleck's ode to Boston is entertaining without being thoughtless. As an added bonus for those of us who dislike gratuitous violence in movies, the violence doesn't overwhelm the film. If Hollywood still felt that Ben Affleck needed redeeming, surely The Town accomplishes that.