Solid, compelling thriller that further solidifies Affleck as a director to be reckoned with

Rating: 9/10 (5 July 2011)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Doug Macray (Ben Affleck) is one of a group of career criminals who plan and carry out bank robberies in the Charlestown area of Boston. On the latest heist, bank worker Claire (Rebecca Hall) is taken hostage and released under no uncertain terms that her life will be over if she talks to the cops. But with FBI Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) on their trail, Doug finds himself, as the most level headed and compassionate of the group, forced to work his way into Claire's life to keep tabs on her, especially when it emerges she identified a tattoo on the back of the neck of James (Jeremy Renner), a more aggressive and ruthless member of the group. As Frawley intensifies his chase, and the truth looks set to come out, Doug must work to stop everything exploding into hell around him.
Action is a genre that's started to feel especially generic and interchangeable in recent years, bereft of a lot of the inspiration and colour it enjoyed in it's halycon days of the 70s and, certainly, the 80s. It's high time something came by that resembled the days when it truly felt like an event, like something really thorough and satisfying. And even better that the emphasis isn't all on the big explosions and shoot outs, but with more than a dash of human dynamics thrown in, which gives the story that bit more edge and verve and makes you care about it and the characters that bit more. Ben Affleck's second directorial effort after the amazing Gone Baby Gone manages this, as well as further cementing him as a new directing talent to be reckoned with, competent and compelling, able to tell a brilliant story and charge it with enough emotion to make you stick with it to the end. It could certainly be argued he is a much better director than he is an actor.
Affleck, Hall, Renner and Hamm are the main players of the story, and it certainly helps that they are all on electrifying form, but even better that they have such a strong supporting cast in the shape of Balke Lively, Chris Cooper and, in what may have been his last role, the late Pete Postlethwaite, fierce and powerful as ever, but admittently looking rather pale and gaunt, on account of his deteriorating condition. Still, if it was the case, this is certainly a fitting swansong to head out on, one cog in part of a very well built machine. ****