The Town is riddled with clichés, but this one is the most apt: “Less than the sum of its parts.” Despite a stellar cast, a fine director, a decent script and even a nifty idea to its credit, The Town never feels like anything terribly special. Ben Affleck’s noble efforts to elevate a standard heist film to the height of drama don’t so much fail as undermine all the actual “heist” parts, while the heist formula is so familiar that it keeps the pathos from ever being taken too seriously. The Town is a very good movie, and normally that would be enough, but it’s trying so hard to be a great movie and failing so miserably at it that it feels like a disappointment anyway.
Ben Affleck directed The Town, which stars Ben Affleck – surprisingly enough – as a guy living in a town. Specifically, Charlestown, which an opening blurb at the start of the film informs us is a breeding ground for bank robbers (and a hilarious closing blurb reminds us is also home to lots of non-bank robbers as well; special thanks to the legal department for embarrassing themselves and the movie alike). Affleck plays Doug MacRay, a very professional bank robber who is forced to take a hostage during his latest heist after his partner James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner of The Hurt Locker) starts getting too violent for his own good. They let her go unharmed, but Doug tracks her down later to determine if she knows anything that could incriminate his crew. Since she’s played by the beautiful and talented actress Rebecca Hall (so brilliant in Vicky Cristina Barcelona), they fall in love. Will Doug ever confess that he was her abductor? Will she figure it out on her own? Will Doug be able to pull that “one last job” and retire to Florida, or will Coughlin’s increasingly terrifying behavior get the whole crew killed?
The Town is a B-Movie with an A-List cast. Mad Men’s Jon Hamm plays the FBI agent tracking MacRay down, but his presence is wasted in a role that literally requires nothing more of him than to be the cop in a heist flick. Jeremy Renner is excellent as always as “The Guy Who Isn’t Acting Like A Professional” (see: Heat, Reservoir Dogs, Charley Varrick, etc.), yet like Hamm he has little else to work with besides his function in the plot. But at least they turn in admirable work: Blake Lively appears lost in a sea of slutty clichés as Coughlin’s sister, overplaying her hand in an apparent attempt to top Amy Ryan’s scene-stealing performance in Gone Baby Gone. Her push-up bra offers better performance than she does.
But that’s the kind of thing that happens when you take a straightforward crime thriller and try to turn it into something important. Ben Affleck proved himself an excellent director with Gone Baby Gone, but doesn’t have as interesting a story to work with here. His heist sequences are expertly crafted and intense, but all the stuff in between suffers from his attempts to elevate the material, which the narrative never entirely supports. Aside from the cute premise that the hostage unknowingly falls for her abductor, there’s nothing even remotely new about The Town, which makes it very hard to take the film as seriously as Ben Affleck does. We know how all the characters end up because we’ve seen this film a dozen times, which makes Affleck’s attempts to dramatize these familiar plot points beyond the scope of a nifty heist flick seem unnecessary and distracting. Noble perhaps, but he’s reaching further than his material can reasonably grasp.
Which is a shame, because the material actually has a firm grasp on the heist movie formula. When Affleck just lets the material play out, and indulges in the occasionally badass action sequence, The Town is a fine film in its own right: Cool, collected and classy. It may be one of the better heist films in recent memory, but it’s just not as good as Ben Affleck seems to think it is.
Crave Online Rating: 7 out of 10
