I was shocked, it was great!

Rating: 10/10 (22 September 2010)

I don't hate Ben Affleck. Many of the other contributers on this website might, but I never have. I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a "fan", but I wouldn't avoid a movie because he was in it. I will and have avoided Ben Affleck movies not because of the person, but because his filter (i.e. terrible movies) is apparently set at zero. He probably should have fired his agent somewhere around 2003-04. I mean, just IMDb his stream of hits between 2001 and 2004. Some of these movies were money makers, well, at least Pearl Harbor, but most were flops on a scale that would have derailed Tom Hank's career. Affleck has proved resilient through this, and believe it or not, people still give him money in the film making business. Matter of fact they give him creative control over his movies now.
That's right folks Ben Affleck is now not just an actor, but a writer/ director, and he's pretty good at it. The Town impressed me much more than I thought it would. The story is pretty generic: Guy robs bank, takes hostage, falls in love with said hostage, stalks her, protects her from accomplices, protects her from policeall of this handled in a way that doesn't seem pointless. The story actually works pretty well, and the sheer audacity of robbing Fenway Park is admittedly pretty cool. Yet, the main shortcoming of the movie, what keeps it from being an A is the story itself.
I can't help but wonder if the reason the movie succeeds rests more upon the acting of Ben Affleck, or his direction, than on the original story on which it was based, a book by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote Boston movies Mystic River, Shutter Island, and Affleck's first directing effort, Gone Baby Gone. No joke, Affleck knocks it out of the park playing gangster with a heart of gold (who never killed anybody) Doug MacRay. I bought the character from the beginning. He plays a very methodical bank robber, who keeps his cool no matter the situation. Jeremy Renner plays Doug's partner and best friend Jem, the id of the duo. Jem is played with almost unrestrained intensity, yet never in a cartoon way. He represents everything "the town", Charlestown, Ma, stands for, at least in Affleck's portrayal of the Boston suburb. He is fiercely loyal and ready to settle any situation with violence. This group dynamic and the action alone, make the movie worth seeing.
The romance part of the story, while not seeming tacked on, does feel unessential. It is used to tie a couple of things together, but everything we learn about the gang through this relationship could have been learned elsewhere. The more interesting, yet underdeveloped, relationship is between Doug and Jem's cracked out sister, Krista, played with disgusting authenticity by Blake Lively. Her story plays much more realistic and is more integral to the plot, although the climax of her story seems kinda out of nowhere. Once again I do not blame this on Afflecks direction, but on the source story itself. My initial rating of the movie after walking out of the theater was a B-; I just wasn't feeling something about it. I think it had to do with the unimportance of the love story. Upon reflection, I'll raise the grade to a solid B. Not a must see, but if it's on Netflix, check it out. The most important thing I got out of this movie was that Ben Affleck is an up and coming director, one who I will follow. I can definitely say that I want to see his next directed effort after seeing this film.
Rating = B

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