Funny Face Masks

Rating: 8/10 (6 March 2011)

"The Town" is fairly standard cops and robbers cinema -- enlivened, however, by color-rich shots of Boston and its once down-and-out neighborhood of Charlestown, the Town of the title. The Bunker Hill monument, Fenway Park, and assorted second-floor walk-ups never looked so good. Ben Afleck and Jeremy Renner play a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of local mobsters, the tall one pensive and troubled, with a dad in the pen and a mom who left him as a kid, the short one just mean and trigger-happy. Renner well deserved his best supporting actor nominations in 2011. The level of violence throughout is convincing.
Afleck improbably gets involved with the comely bank manager of the gang's most recent heist, played here by Rebecca Hall. She tends a communal garden, so you know she's sensitive. That sets up a contest for Afleck's character's soul in which the FBI, its special agents having apparently abandoned snap-brimmed fedoras in favor of T-shirts that read "FBI," intervenes. It all ends predictably, but getting there -- thanks to Affleck's direction and the cinematography -- is more than half the fun. Eight stars.