strong characters steal the show

Rating: Null/10 (21 September 2011)

Starring Ben Affleck as a bank robber from the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown, The Town is far more polished than the average crime thriller.
Affleck, who also wrote the script, plays Doug MacRay, the leader of a group of bank robbers from the Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown. Doug and his friends Jem, Gloansy and Dez carry out big time bank heists. Doug and Jem live together and have been best friends since childhood.
The film opens as the gang robs a local bank branch, taking a teller (Claire) hostage. When they realize that she lives in their neighborhood, Doug decides to keep an eye on her. Doug and Claire end up falling in love, which worries the other members of the crew.
Meanwhile, the FBI, led by agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm), is building a case against the crew, unbeknownst to Doug. Throughout the rest of the film, Doug and his crew carry out several more heists. All the while Doug struggles with a desire to get out of "the town." Doug's life of crime begins to eat away him. The stress is becoming too much and he wants out. However, it turns out that the world of crime is much harder to leave than Doug imagined. Affleck turns in a fantastic performance though the character was certainly not difficult for him to play. Having grown up in Boston, Affleck wasn't so much playing a character as drawing from personal experience (think Eminem in 8 Mile). Affleck deserves praise though, not for his acting, but for his directing and script writing. The film isn't driven by the performances of the actors (though Jeremy Renner is fantastic as Jem). Rather, Affleck creates a convincing portrait of the Boston crime world. The characters are as believable as they dysfunctional. The characters Affleck creates are incredibly complex. Doug, for example, is a bank robber, whose father is in jail, whose mother left him when he was 6, he was a star hockey player in his youth but his bad temper cost him a shot at the NHL, he dated his best friends sister, she has a child who she says is his, he says it's not, and so on and so on.
At its essence, this is a crime movie. The bank robbery film has been done several times before. The film has all the shootouts and car chases you expect from a thriller plus all the strong characters and moral conflict you expect from the best dramas.