Now THAT's how you make a cops n robbers flick folks!

Rating: 9/10 (13 January 2011)

I was one of the very few people disappointed by "The Departed." Being in the Boston area, folks here can spot fake accents a mile away, and on top of that annoying gaffe, much of the movie seemed too stylized and hyperbolized for its own good. It was Cops n Robbers as HIGH DRAMA, a film that tried to achieve the operatic tone and scale of The Godfather but just wound up feeling cheap in the end.
It needed the gritty, unadorned performances and look that director/actor Ben Affleck has somehow managed to score in spades with "The Town." Much of the film's punch rides on the performances: Affleck has never been less self-absorbed and never more absorbed in his character, a master bank robber whose increasing self-disgust finally finds a well-needed escape valve in the form of pretty bank manager Rebecca Hall. Now if only he hadn't taken her hostage in his last job....
Perhaps even more powerful are the drop-dead notes struck by Jeremy Renner, as Affleck's hard-case brother, Pete Postelthwaite as a dirt-bag local numbers runner, and Chris Cooper in a died-in-the-wool performance that is chilling for its brief on screen time. Even Jon Hamm knocks it out of the park as a G-man whose hatred for Affleck's crew courses through his body like motor oil through a piston. Seriously, Affleck is getting to be the Clint Eastwood or Robert Redford of Actor's Equity --- one phone call from him and the A Team shows up at his doorstep. It's all good.
What makes "The Town" most memorable though, are its action sequences, masterfully shot by Robert Elswitt. Make no mistake, shooting a car chase in Cambridge is about as easy as parking your car there in daylight hours, only a tad more deadly. It's not photographed showily, just effectively, and you can say that about almost every other element of this film.
It's a throw-back to when Heist movies were about the basics --- simple, violent realism. And that was enough. It hearkens back to the days of Cagney and Bogart, instead of Nicholson and Walhberg.