Very fun, but formulaic

Rating: Null/10 (26 September 2011)

Ben Affleck directs "The Town", an entertaining crime picture in which a band of thieves rob banks, fall in love with women who endanger their lives, are tracked down by police detectives, engage in "one risky last job", get caught, take part in a bloody police shootout and die. In other words, the film is wholly derivative of Michael Mann's "Heat" - itself a film which deliberately stockpiled clichés - and to a lesser extent Kathryn Bigelow's "Point Break".
The film may be nothing but a clothesline of clichés, but like his earlier crime picture, "Gone Baby Gone", Affleck's style is low key, gritty and actor-centric enough to differentiate it from most mainstream, action fare. You know what's coming, but "The Town's" faux verisimilitude and faux naturalism keeps things somewhat fresh, even if Affleck's view of tough types and working class Boston is merely cookie-cutter underclass romance.
The film is so shamelessly generic that it seems to tap into not only recent "heist" and "gang movies", but old, black-and-white Warner classics (eg "White Heat", "Public Enemy" etc; notice the similarity to Mann's titles), in which we salivate over daring hoodlums and their blaze of glory fade outs. For this reason, the film's pleasures are mostly archetypal.
8/10 – "The Town" is part of Affleck's calculated "re-imaging process" ("Hollywoodland", "Gone Baby Gone" etc), the actor, after a decade of being a Hollywood laughing stock, desperate to reinvent himself as a "serious artist". Worth one viewing.