Great performances all-round and directing make this well worth watching

Rating: 8/10 (20 January 2011)

Despite not having seen Gone Baby Gone, I've heard a lot of good things about Ben Affleck's switch to directing and so I decided to watch The Town, which put simply is about band robbers but to expand on that, the film is also about the leader of the group, played by Ben Affleck.
When watching the trailer it easy to draw comparisons to Heat and The Departed but this is different. Many films about crime make the audience side either the police or the criminals yet The Town allows the audience to see people from both sides of the law fairly. Jon Hamm plays an honest working FBI officer while Ben Affleck plays the criminal. The film is shot predominately from the criminals perspective, therefore the audience feel the same sense of urgency that they do but we don't want to see them gun down the FBI and police and let them get away with their crimes. It is a difficult challenge for the director to deal with but he does it well and the end result is very good.
The entire cast are all fantastic even when given smaller roles, for example Chris Cooper and the late Pete Postlethwaite steel the scenes that they are in. Jeremy Renner has earned a lot of attention from his role and he deserves it, giving an honest performance, which clearly took a lot of research to perfect. An almost unrecognisable Blake Lively and Rebecca Hall are both great. Ben Affleck and Jon Hamm as the opposing forces are also great but it is Renner's performance that stands out.
As a crime film, it is important that the action doesn't turn the whole film into an all guns blazing film. The action scenes are handed pretty well and the car chases through the minor roads of Boston are really exciting to watch.
The Town is not only only a solid action/ crime film but also marks Affleck as a great director. I strongly recommend this film if you are interested in the genre. While it is not perfect, it does so much well, that you would be missing out if you didn't see this.