The Town

I am actually writing the review to this movie a few weeks after I watched it. I wouldn't usually do this but again, GTA took up a lot of my time the past few weeks.

Before I begin, again, I like this cover to the movie better. It looks like a release cover in France or somewhere else, but I like it better. It actually reminds me of a lot of elements I had forgotten in the past few weeks.

The Town takes place in Charleston, a neighborhood of Boston Massachusetts, where bank robberies is "passed down like a trade" The film begins with a robbery taking place at a bank by Doug McRay (Ben Affleck) and Jem Coughlin (Jeremy Renner). They take the bank manager, played by Rebecca Hall hostage and use her to escape. Unfortunately, Couglin thinks she could identify them because of where she lives so McRay goes to "take care of it". And some how he ends up dating her. All the while Jon Hamm is an FBI agents who is tracking the different jobs that these men do throughout the movie cumulating to one big heist at the end where they try to rob Fenway park.

There's a lot of characters that play larger roles that I didn't mention, like Blake Lively, Chris Cooper, and Pete Postlethwaite.

If you go into this movie with the sole purpose of seeing a lot of heists, you're going to be sadly disappointed. Though there's a few of them and they are good, there are not enough heists in this movie in my opinion. But that's not what this movie is about.

The movie is a lot of this. Ben Affleck and Rebecca Hall talking. And that's to be expected from a drama. I'll say that again, this is not an action movie, this is a drama. I think a lot of people misunderstand that.

This movie is more of a character study of Doug McRay and many criminals who find themselves in the same situation he finds himself in, a guy who choses what was considered the family business because the system wasn't made for him. They say in the movie that Doug wanted to play Hockey and go pro. He instead got injured and lost his chance to play. Surrounded by people like his father, Coughlin and others, he pretty much had no choice but to rob banks. When he meets Rebecca Hall, he sees a way out of it. Not at first, it takes some time but there is actually a moment when he says, I'm out.

The problem is Coughlin, his sister/ Doug's kinda girlfriend?, all say, you can't leave. This is your life people depend on you and you can't leave. It's almost as if this story follows Ben Affleck's character in Good Will Hunting into his 30s. Except for Will's friends telling him he should leave town to pursue his dreams, Affleck's friends are telling him he can't leave.

This of course is another work directed by Ben Affleck. The joke is that everyone says that Affleck is now kind of okay to like because its post director Affleck. I have to give him credit in that he's better in this movie then I've seen him in a lot of movies. However, he's surrounded by people that are really good, Renner, Hamm, Cooper that his acting, whether it is good or not, is covered up by them. That being said, I had no complaints with Affleck in this movie.

Renner was phenomenal, Lively was phenomenal, an hot. (In a prostitute, trashy kind of way) Hamm was awesome although kind of forgettable, especially a few weeks later. I didn't know Jon Hamm was in that movie before I watched it and I'm having a hard time remembering him in it now. But he was awesome, I know that. He needs to do more roles like that. I like him as Don Draper but I also like him as the guy that can get his hands dirty. Chris Cooper was awesome although incredibly underused. He's Affleck's father who is in prison. He maybe has 2 scenes and they're only to help build the case study of Affleck.

It made me think back to an earlier work of Affleck's Gone Baby Gone.

I think I went into this movie with the same idea, that it was going to be a lot of action. (I have to stop doing that with Affleck films) I think I enjoyed Gone Baby Gone more but only because it had more tension and was a little bit more gritty. I think there were signs of that grittiness in The Town but it didn't show off as much.

I'm most likely going to do a review on Gone Baby Gone soon. Expect it. I will most likely draw back to The Town for that one and eventually I'll do all of Affleck's work to see if there's something about all of them that makes them good or not.

But that's all I have on The Town. A pretty good drama, a few underused characters but an interesting case study on criminals and their mindset when they are forced into crime via their environment.

So what do you think? Do you like Batfleck as a director? What's your favorite one of his works? Let me know. I'm sorry this review took so long but I'm getting on a roll, hopefully more reviews are to come.