2 stars (out of four)
There is a conversation in The Town where Doug MacRay (played by Ben Affleck, who also co-writes and directs the film) tells the beautiful bank manager Claire (Rebecca Hall) everything he knows about police investigations. As the leader of a highly successful team of bank robbers, he knows a good deal. When Claire questions how he became such an expert, he’s quick to respond – he just watches a lot of CSI, he says. That line, which gets a laugh and is one of the film’s few authentic moments, suggests that director Affleck is at least aware of the crime genre’s recent ubiquity in TV and film. Strange, then, that he would willingly throw his film into that exhaustive sea of material without offering anything new. The Town makes an effort to be a lot of different things – a heist film, a redemption story, a straight-up action flick, The Departed – but never develops its ideas enough and ends up a rather underwhelming affair.
The titular town is Charlestown, a neighborhood in Boston the opening text informs us is home to more bank robbers than anywhere else in the country. The film opens with one of those robbers, MacRay, about to embark on his latest job. With him is his childhood friend Jem (The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner) and two more buddies of theirs who are more or less interchangeable and forgettable throughout the film. The job is a familiar one (for both them and us), involving rubber masks, automatic rifles and a safe. Things go as planned, but to ensure their getaway they take the aforementioned Claire hostage and dump her off blindfolded once they’ve made their getaway.
All this happens before the opening title, leaving the rest of the film to explore the aftermath of the opening heist. MacRay may be becoming interested in Claire, Jem is anxious to score again despite the threat of an FBI investigator (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm) on their tail, and a local kingpin (Pete Postlethwaite) tempts the team with a dangerous job. Each of these storylines has dramatic potential, but a script full of stock characters and familiar situations keeps the film from realizing that potential.
Viewed as a heist film, The Town doesn’t involve us enough in the robberies (of which the film gives us three) and Affleck makes little effort to breathe new life into familiar scenes. The crimes themselves are of course not the film’s main focus, but the action scenes fail to raise the dramatic stakes or add anything more than a generic car chase or a shootout.
The Town would like to present itself as a story of redemption, one where our hero MacRay tries to bring himself up from circumstances beyond his control and get out of Charlestown. We never get a sense, however, that his life of crime is one that he’s been forced into. There may be socio-economic conditions forcing young men like him to rob banks but the film neglects to present them. MacRay gets even harder to sympathize with the more he becomes involved with Claire. Rebecca Hall, who was wonderful in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is wasted here playing the attractive woman who’s only allowed to react to the men of the film, never act of her own accord. Claire is lied to and manipulated, and makes some choices late in the film that are hard to believe anyone would make considering all that has happened to her.
Meanwhile, the very reasonable FBI detective Adam Frawley is trying to catch the bad guys. The film perhaps wants to paint him as the antagonist but mistakenly casts the likable Jon Hamm in the role making it unclear where our allegiance is supposed to lie. MacRay isn’t enough of an underdog to root for, Frawley isn’t mean enough to root against, and there is not enough interplay between the two to create some good cat-and-mouse tension.
As MacRay’s best friend, the trigger-happy Jem causes a lot of trouble for no reason. Jeremy Renner does fine with a one-dimensional character but following a much more complex depiction of masculinity in The Hurt Locker, the role doesn’t ask much of him. Blake Lively (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) steps out of her tween-film comfort zone and is strong as MacRay’s drug-addicted former flame. Rounding out the cast is Chris Cooper in a brief appearance as MacRay’s father. Cooper establishes a tenuous father-son relationship in his one, brief scene but his role here is a minor one.
The Town runs off stock characters and familiar themes, never digging deep enough to develop its ideas of family, community or the social trappings of crime. The film passes us by, going through the motions so that we forget it faster than a witness struggling to identify her attacker in a lineup.
- Steve Avigliano, 10/15/10
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