Review of the film The Town

            The Town, directed by Ben Affleck, is ultimately an overblown Bostonian affair that left me slightly sleepy. I guess the tiredness came from the amount of energy the film requires a viewer to put into caring about the characters that it takes such thoughtfulness to draw and then almost predictably puts through action movie trope paces and ends. It’s kind of exhausting to watch, not least of all because the lone Boston native, the director and lead, has the worst accent in the entire cast.

The film begins with a quote explaining to viewers that the mostly blue collar Charleston neighborhood of Boston is home to more bank robbers per square inch than most American penitentiaries. This immediately leads to a robbery scene involving four men masked as nuns with melting faces doing a job on a large, profitable bank branch. Things get hairy. They take a hostage—the pretty and new assistant manager—whom they do let free. But this becomes a loose end that must be taken care of, in the form of the team leader, Doug (Ben Affleck), following the scared beauty to ensure that she does not give up anything to the sniffing Federals. It seems silly that Claire (Rebecca Hall) is so naïve to think that this man suddenly snooping around her life does not have a hidden agenda, but she is emotionally devastated by the robbery situation. She is out of his league, obviously so, and there is some interesting class tension that plays out. Inevitably, Doug and Claire fall for each other, and the tension shifts to Doug’s relationship with his team and lifestyle. He no longer wants to rob banks for a living. Claire shows him what he does want and that is a life beyond circumnavigating the law and the bad associations that it brings. We all know where this will lead—the last and ultimate heist.

Doug is level headed and smart, too profitable an investment to allow to walk away. There are elements that, of course, want him to continue his thieving ways. The wonderful character actor Pete Postlethwaite enters the picture as an insidious florist slash money launderer who pushes the issue to a scary point. There is also Doug’s best friend and partner, Jem (Jeremy Renner), who cannot imagine a life outside of thieving. He violently wants to hold onto the status quo that he and Doug possessed before that previous fateful robbery. And the Federals are onto their schemes at this point. All this propels the action towards that final job where it is all too easy to realize what is coming about.

It’s to the director, actors and writers’ credit that viewers care about these people as much as they do upon the unfolding of that final act. To put these carefully drawn characters through this weightless melodrama is insensitive. It seems that Affleck is a good wrangler of actors’ performances but is poor at picking a complex and challenging story to put them, and us, through. The Town is never boring, but it is a bit sad and tiresome.