The Town

What's the Deal:  The trailer will tell you The Town is "Heats meets The Departed."  That's pretty bold; it's not as good as either of those movies.   Its still pretty good and there are certainly aspects of the Town that will remind you of both of those.  It also reminds you of Mystic River, but again, not quite as good.

In The Town, Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, and two other guys portray lifelong friends/bank robbers who grew up in the blue collar area of Boston known as Charlestown.  During a particularly tough robbery the team is forced to take a hostage.  Ben Affleck's character follows her around after they release her (they were wearing masks, so she can't recognize them) to make sure she doesn't tell the police more information.  They start talking at one point and hit it off, eventually becoming a little "item."  Of course this makes Affleck's character question his life choices.  The rest of the movie is him wrestling with these choices, running from the cops and figuring out who he's really loyal to.

What I like:

1.  It's just a good heist/action movie.  The bank robberies are cool, the gunfights are cool, the interrogations are cool.  It's very entertaining.

2.  Car chases.  There are several, and they're actually really exciting.  Some of them are through narrow old Boston streets, giving the scene a pretty claustrophobic feeling.  They were surprisingly well done.

3.  Emotional?  I actually noticed several people wiping their eyes as we were leaving the theater.  It's not meant to be a tear-jerker.  I think its more of a testament to how much the audience was buying into the film than that its actually "sad."  Also, we watched it at the "Angelika" theater in Dallas, which is kind of the artsy theater that generally attracts weirdos.  So maybe the other people watching, the ones that cried, were just kind of weird.

What I didn't:

1.  Did you know that Ben Affleck is from Boston?  This might have to do with my being perpetually annoyed with Red Sox fans (Ben Affleck is an especially loud one), but I'm getting slightly tired of "Boston" movies (The Departed, Mystic River, to name a couple.  Those are great movies, of course, but the city of Boston is almost a character...).  There are struggling, blue collar parts of every city in the country, many of them with less annoying movie accents.  Along those lines, one of the robberies actually occurs at Fenway Park.  I think it was just an excuse for Affleck to walk around the underground Fenway Park Tunnels and stuff.

Side Note: I can't figure out Ben Affleck:  He's had an interesting career.  He started out as quite a superstar, winning an oscar very early on.  He's in some really, really great movies.  Good Will Hunting, Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy (Kevin Smith used to be so good...), Armageddon was actually a good movie, I thought.

Then he became the butt of jokes.  He went through a stretch of awful, awful movies.  Reindeer games.  Daredevil.  Pearl Harbor.  Surviving Christmas, Gigli, Paycheck.  Goodness, that's a bad list.  I also think he bit off more than he could chew when he tried to play Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears.  Harrison Ford is Jack Ryan...not Ben Affleck.  (Technically so is Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October... but you get my point).

Then Gone Baby Gone came out.  When I found out it was directed by Ben Affleck, I had my doubts.  And I was not alone.  Turns out, it was really, really good.  And so was The Town...

Other issues:  According to the opening credits, the place in America where more bank robberies occur than any other is "Charlestown."  This may very well be true.  However, I don't think they're the type of bank robberies that occur in this movie.  These take place in broad daylight with the perps wearing scary masks, taking hostages, shooting automatic weapons in the street in broad daylight (should sound like Heat...), and frequently, getting away with it.  I just feel like I would hear about those on the news if that's how they really happened.