The Town (2010)

Director: Ben Affleck

Cast: Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Blake Lively, Jon Hamm

Set in the town of Charlestown where bank robbers are born and passed down through generations, Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck), James “Jem” Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), Gloansy and Dez are the next generation in a group that starts the story robbing a bank which results in them taking the bank manager as a hostage and then letting her go unharmed.  This starts to worry them when the FBI, especially Special Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) gets involved and Doug decides to approach the bank manager, a woman called Claire (Rebecca Hall) and starts to fall in love with her.  Just as he wants to leave town with her, there is a big job that comes up that he has to take.  The question now is whether he’ll be able to get out of this mess and manage to leave the town.

I liked the cast a lot.  Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall and Jon Hamm and even many of the other characters was amazing.  They were great in their roles.  I really enjoyed that a lot.  The only person that I didn’t enjoy was Blake Lively as Coughlin’s sister and also a girl who loves Doug.  I’ve been a fan of Blake Lively in Gossip Girl and even when she did The Sisterhood of  the Traveling Pants movies.  She was fantastic in that but somehow for this one, her accent sounded forced and it bothered me because if I didn’t have the subtitles, I wouldn’t have understood what she said at all.  However, she didn’t have that much screen time so it was alright.

I’ve never been a big fan of Ben Affleck as an actor, but funny enough, I’ve been seeing his movies which he directed.  This one definitely was a good movie, maybe not a great one for me.  However, I did enjoy Gone Baby Gone so thats why I had decided to give this a shot.  Point is, even as an actor here, I found him very enjoyable.  Maybe its because this is something that he’s creating himself so there is more heart and soul that he puts into even the role he takes.  It doesn’t really matter because it works to its advantage.

Also, I felt that I enjoyed the second half of the movie a lot more than the first part.  It really takes some time to get into the whole story.  Its not that the basis is bad.  I did some research and its based on a novel called Prince of Thieves which I will add to my reading list.  As a crime thriller, I felt that it really caught my attention near the climax when things started getting bad and then eventually get to the very awesome ending.

Even though thats the case, I did sit to think about this a bit and I’d say that its definitely worth a viewing.  The good parts really more than make up for the parts that were lacking and I’m pretty sure that I would gladly sit down and watch this again.

So what do you think about The Town? How about your views on Ben Affleck as a director? Or maybe you  liked him better as an actor?