The Town

Venice (Out of Competition) – Ben Affleck's star-studded return trip to Boston sees him not only directing but also starring as the bank-robbing mastermind who wants to leave his criminal past behind. Emma Rowley and Paul Martin take a tour of The Town.

Emma: For his second directorial feature Ben Affleck returns to the world of crime in Boston's blue-collar neighbourhoods. The film is an adaptation of Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves, the screenplay written by Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, the latter of whom collaborated on the script for Gone Baby Gone (itself another adaptation, this time of a Dennis Lehane novel).

The plot concerns four childhood friends from the projects, Doug, Jem, Gloansy and Desmond, who have bonded over planning and executing bank robberies and security van heists. Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) is the brains of the outfit, devising a series of slick, professional operations with neat touches like soaking the place in bleach and leaving misleading DNA (from hair salon sweepings) that prevent the FBI from nabbing them, although the group is well known to the Feds.

A complication arises in the form of bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall), who is traumatised when violence-prone Jem (Jeremy Renner) grabs her as a hostage during one of the heists. She is let out unharmed but shaken by their threats, and Jem is concerned she may subsequently be able to identify them. Fearing Jem will silence her the old-fashioned way, Doug agrees to follow her and find out what she knows. But after she strikes up a conversation with him, they start a tentative relationship via which Doug begins to see that there may be life beyond his dead-end existence. But of course, in movieland, it's never easy to walk away from a life of crime and both his friend Jem and local fixer Fergus Colm (Peter Postlethwaite) insist he complete a series of robberies.

In spite of its array of talented and familiar actors, The Town never achieves the plausibility of Gone Baby Gone. Most of the characters seem stale and shopworn – the local hero turned bad, his psychotic buddy, the hero's drug-addled old flame, the sweet-natured, new romantic interest. Jon Hamm and Blake Livley suffer in particular from two-dimensional roles: he as the stiff FBI agent determined to get his man; she as the childhood sweetheart determined to cling onto hers. Even immensely skilled actors like Renner and Hall struggle with roles that are just too clichéd to engage with.

The Town is one of those films that the more you turn it over in your mind, the less sense it makes. It appears that in the transition from novel to screen Doug MacRay received a bit of a whitewash to paint him as a generic good guy in bad circumstances, rather than the roguish mastermind of the book. As a result, there's an empty, hero-shaped space in the middle of the film where a real character should be. There is fun to be had in the heists themselves, in particular a security van robbery that goes awry, necessitating a speedy getaway through Boston's back streets. But at two hours, without one original moment outside of the action set-pieces, it is a bit of a disappointment.

Paul: Ben Affleck earned no little praise for his directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, with one of his smartest moves on that picture arguably being to hand the lead role to li'l bro Casey, as opposed to attempting to tackle it himself. And as you watch The Town, as you gaze upon Affleck ambling around in outsized tracksuit like a vacationing Elton John, as you see him continually mistake allowing his jaw to hang slackly open like a baffled gorilla for the dramatic conveyance of emotion, as you in one scene witness him bursting in to confront arch-bastard florist (don't ask) Pete Postlethwaite looking like an angry cuboid with a USMC haircut, you can't help but wonder what Affleck the younger might have made out of the role of bank robber-cum-hostage romancer Doug MacRay, so brilliant was his turn in The Killer Inside Me earlier this year.

Alas and alack, it is the exasperating Ben we are lumbered with here, though so improbable is much of the plot in The Town that Larry Olivier would've struggled to make it seem convincing to an audience. Undoubtedly the prime offender on this count is the relationship between MacRay and Rebecca Hall's Claire, with the pair's first face-to-face meeting setting the standard of biscuit-taking to which subsequent events aspire. Tasked with trailing her, Doug follows her into a launderette and sits down next to her. Within sixty seconds she has come over to ask for change for the machines, before happening to display the blouse bloodstained in the raid that he masterminded, which in turn sets her weeping – he then stepping in to console her without having so much as raised an eyebrow in any kind of expended effort.

Aside from such affronts to credulity, a reek of self-importance hangs over the movie; from the opening epigraph advising the rates of criminality in Charlestown, as if this is some kind of developing world issue of which we should all be made aware, to the ridiculous moment in the opening robbery where Affleck's gun-brandishing crook suddenly decides he's in Avatar or Dances With Wolves, taking Claire by the hand and exhorting her to remain calm as she opens the safe.

Okay, it's not all a big bust – a mid-movie car chase reminds you just how exciting vehicular bedlam can be on the big screen when not rendered using CGI trickery – but the postlude to the final confrontation between cops and robbers finds The Town venturing into territory as stinking of cheese as an Alpine fondue palace. And as for that final shot... by the beard of Affleck, if it ain't some Grade-A crapola.

Rating on a scale of 5 nuns on the run: 2

Release date: US: 17 September; UK: TBC
Directed by: Ben Affleck
Screenplay by: Peter Craig, Ben Affleck, Aaron Stockard, based on a novel by Chuck Hogan
Cast: Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, John Hamm, Blake Lively, Pete Postlethwaite, Chris Cooper, Slaine, Owen Burke
Rating: USA: R; UK: 15
Running time: 125 minutes

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