The Town Review

The second film we saw was “The Town.” It is Ben Affleck’s second work as a director and he also stars in it. Affleck plays Doug MacRay, a criminal who has recently begun robbing banks with several friends. The supporting cast includes Jeremy Renner as Doug’s best friend James "Jem" Coughlin, Jon Hamm as FBI agent Adam Frawley, Blake Lively as Doug’s ex and Jem’s sister Krista Coughlin, and Rebecca Hall as Claire who is a victim of one of Doug’s bank robberies. The film takes place in Boston, Massachusetts where the criminals are being pursued by Special Agent Frawley.

At the beginning of the film Doug, Jem, and two other guys rob a bank where they take one of the bank-employees hostage for a short time. They then get away and later Doug sees the woman they kidnapped on the street and follows her. They become romantically involved without her knowing who he really is. At first I found this to be interesting, but I was buying it less and less as the movie went on. She eventually finds out who he is and is horrified. The second bank robbery in the movie goes wrong and Doug finds himself on the run, alone, and in a police uniform. He doesn’t really run though, he stays right around the scene of the incident to see if Jem survives, and to taunt the FBI agent. You’d think someone would catch him in plain sight walking around since at this point he is an incredibly wanted man and most everyone would have seen a release of what he looks like. After Jem dies he leaves a note on the Special Agent’s car that says “Go fuck yourself” or something like that. First off, how did he know which car was the right one and secondly I found this a bit goofy. Jon Hamm’s reaction is basically one of “Gosh darn, that crazy kid got me again.” Then in another unbelievable move, he heads right across the street from the girlfriend’s house and talks to her on the phone. He watches as the law listens in on the call. Then, having a sudden and complete change of heart, the girlfriend gives him a code telling him that she isn’t alone. He also kills two men, when he is on the run, that he forcibly worked for whom tortured and ruined his parents, leading to his mother’s suicide. He kills them in grisly ways, which left a bad taste in my mouth and completely destroys any chance for this character’s redemption. He secretly gives some stolen/blood money to his girlfriend when the film finally comes to an end. The ending shot shows him on a porch looking over an estuary of a wooden house with the wind blowing in his hair as if he is either a changed man now, which again is hardly earned as being believable, or auditioning for the male sex object in a Gloria Estefan music video. I can picture it now; he is swinging his flabby body around a porch pillar longing for a has-been singer known by her birthname as Gloria María Milagrosa Fajardo García de Estefan.

Getting back to the point, one of the largest problems I had trying to like the movie was the total unlikeability of Ben Affleck’s Doug. Pretty much everything the character does is for selfish purposes or at least motivated by selfishness and he has a nasty killing streak too. He is also very stone-faced and without the slightest bit of charm. I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, but all I know is that Affleck’s vanity project came off lazy to me. Blake Lively’s character Krista is poorly drawn out too with a little bit of phony depth here and there. At the beginning when Doug and Krista have sex she seems extremely disinterested, but later on he tells her that he’s moving way with his girlfriend and she acts really heartbroken. As far as performances go I was impressed with Jeremy Renner as the loose-cannon friend of Doug’s. He seemed naturalistic and like he was having fun with his part, unlike Affleck.

Having said all that, I did enjoy the action sequences. They were well done and kept me feeling on the edge of my seat. In the end I just felt like I’d seen a poorly-scripted version of so many other crime dramas. My final ruling is a 2 out of 5.