Its action set-pieces are high-notes, but the overall effect is a weak and fairly forgettable one.

Rating: 6/10 (18 May 2018)

'The Town (2010)' is a thriller centred around a gang of bank robbers residing in the supposed 'breeding ground for armed robbers', Charlestown in Boston, Massachusetts. As is usual for most of Affleck's fare, and for most of the features set in that particular city, there is a distinct air of 'localism', highlighting a close-knit community with almost patriotic levels of commitment to one another. This sense of pride for a place is pushed hard, with the ground-level - and usually criminal - elements elevated to a pedestal even above the country - and, certainly, law of the land - in which they reside, almost like those jingoistic military flicks if they were to replace their flag with a back-yard barbecue. It is a strange choice, to put so much emphasis on the setting of the piece when it isn't even all that relevant to the story. Stranger still, is to feature TV-style sweeping shots of the skyline. Still, the handling of the environment is practically a trope for features set in the director's home-town at this point, so it's understandable why the choice was made. Demonising, or pseudo doing such, the FBI does feel like a missed opportunity, though. It feels generic at this point to make the 'good guys' bad by having them be general jerks, if they can't be outright corrupt (though it starts heading that way at one point), and makes for a less interesting feature. If the FBI guys were more nuanced, the flick could've played as a nice two-hander, a cat-and-mouse with conflicting sympathies on the part of the audience. As is, the audience is only meant to root for Affleck and company, whom are all 'bad guys' and don't do much to change our perception from that. Personally, I did empathise with the protagonist, but the other members of the crew aren't fleshed out enough to care for and some of their actions aren't ones you'd want to see go unpunished. In this way, we don't always root for our 'heroes' to get away with it, which means that the switching of the 'good and bad' has kind of failed. Arguably, this would make a more nuanced piece but nuance isn't being aimed for in this aspect. The feature is fairly slow, too. Its central romance feels doomed to fail, fleshed out only so that it can fall apart, and isn't gripping enough to be a main focus. It also isn't given all that much attention despite its time on-screen. The handling of character development is nice in some select scenes, but much of the 'masculinity gone awry' has been done better before. The action set-pieces are all fantastic, though. The finale, especially, is a taut and tense affair with frenetic violence escalating from some fairly suspenseful moments. It leaves you on a relatively high-note, despite a slow and stop-start ending - that's also very clichéd, and does make up for some of the less interesting segments. Still, the lasting impact of the piece is a quite weak and forgettable one. 6/10