The Town

I’ve never been to Boston. I don’t know anybody who grew up there. I don’t really know much about the place, or have any desire to go there. I think maybe after seeing this movie I have even less interest in visiting the city by the bay.

This is the second film Ben Affleck has directed, the first being Gone Baby Gone, which I haven’t seen yet. Supposedly it’s much more of a laid-back indie film than this, which is meant to be a sort of thriller-blockbuster. It’s also based on a book which I haven’t read. The only reasons I had any interest in seeing it were that Jon Hamm (the fantastic lead-asshole of Mad Men) has a pretty prominent role, and it’s been getting pretty good reviews. The previews with the weird masks were pretty cool too I guess. So after a few aborted attempts over the last few days I finally got to the theater last night and sat down in front of the big screen for a couple hours.

The story focuses on Affleck’s character, who is portrayed as the “good guy” whose life of crime has been forced on him by a sort of bank-robber caste-system. He is of course in possession of a heart of gold and wishes to “leave this whole (censored) town in my reah view,” an idea of which his other caste-members aren’t too fond, especially Jeremy Renner (the wild-card with too many bullets to keep in his clip). So leading up to his exodus, he has to do a few more jobs, and his gold-laden heart leads him to befriend and be-love one of his bank-manager victims because she’s hot. This is a bad idea generally. The rest of the movie is the continued efforts of Affleck to end his robbing career and leave with the hot chick, involving a few more robberies, a couple shoot outs, and one or two chase scenes. Then it ends rather stupidly and I walk out of the theater a little disappointed.

It’s not that bad really, I just couldn’t connect with the characters. This is a problem I seem to have once in a while with crime-related drama; I can’t make myself love people who make stupid life choices and disrupt the machine of everyone else’s lives, unless the performance is something outstanding like Heath Ledger’s in The Dark Knight or something. At least I think that’s how it is. Sad to say that the acting in this movie just isn’t that spectacular. Not even Jon Hamm did that good of a job, though I think that’s a fault of the script. The action scenes were pretty cool but since I didn’t care whether the characters lived or died they weren’t as gripping as they could have been.

I’m still going to watch Gone Baby Gone at some point, but I can’t say this movie has made me love Ben Affleck the Director.