Crime is grimy.

Rating: 5/10 (14 July 2019)

I'm going to be unpopular and rain on this parade.
The lead characters in "The Town" are all highly unlikable people that pretty much nobody with any sense would actually want to be around in real life. If you pay enough attention to the news, you'd know that Ben Affleck's narcissistic, smarmy, manipulative, psychopathic character (and that's what it really is in hard terms), isn't even acting, but it's the way he is in real life, not just in "reel" life. So, at least, Affleck has his particular character pinned down tight.
All of the acting performances are solid and the plot isn't bad--my big problem is that I never found myself rooting for any of these anti-heroes, not even once, and not even a little bit. I'm not talking about physical characteristics when I say that this is an ugly, grimy, crew of vicious criminals. I'm not being all namby-pamby about this--I've seen and enjoyed tons of violent entertainment, but I found these "lead" characters to be particularly revolting and unrelatable.
I guess our society has become so enamoured of "winners" that even extraordinarily unappealing human beings are appealing when they win. There's no other way that I can explain the high marks for this film. Personally, when I want to see people that are just behaving out-and-out bad, I simply watch some kind of a horror/thriller movie. I won't quite say don't sacrifice two hours of your life to this film, since it's very slick, non-stop entertainment, and you could do worse, but, by the end, I personally was only feeling empty and dirty. Therefore, I'm marking it down some and reaching for the soap. Maybe I'm getting old or something.
P.S. Possibly this film could be part of a "scared-straight" program, given that if there's one thing it doesn't do is make crime look glamorous.