Ryan McNeil
Heist films are an interesting animal: They require a few specific elements to work as a whole. Mandatory requirements are a talented crew, an engaging law enforcement foil, a girl never hurts, and a well executed score. THE TOWN nails almost all of those elements to a tee.
Place your bets now on which element is left wanting. (PS: The answer will be more spoilery than Matinee reviews tend to be)
THE TOWN begins with four lifelong friends dressed as reapers holding up a Cambridge bank. The friends are Doug (Ben Affleck) Jem (Jeremy Renner) Gloansy and Dez. The four come from the Charlestown neighbourhood of Boston, an area that leads the league in breeding criminals from a young age. During the takedown, they grab the assistant bank manager as a hostage, a young lady named Claire (Rebecca Hall).
After turning her loose, the gang realizes they have a slight problem: she lives in their neighbourhood. To get a read on her, Doug fakes an impromptu meeting. The meeting goes a little too well, and the two find themselves sharing a connection – much to the surprise and chagrin of Jem.
Meanwhile, the Boston office of The FBI is intent on taking this gang down. The task force is headed by Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm), who sees how stone cold the Town Crew are and understands what it will take to catch them. The crew seems to be working for a Town crime fixture named Fergie Colm (Pete Postlethwaite), so to nab such hardened criminals, Frawley will have to be clever, lucky,…or what’s best – both.
Before we get to the misstep, let’s talk about what THE TOWN does right. Ben Affleck’s second film does a splendid job of teaching us who these crooks are, or at the very least where they come from. The story surrounding Gloansy and Dez is a little week, but it’s still easy to understand what makes their engine run. What fuels their fire is The Town itself. They are born into it…into this community that you either get out of, or become a victim of. Crime isn’t a biproduct of life in Charlestown, it’s a birthright.
Where Doug and Jem are concerned, they do what they do because they’re good at it. For a lot of reasons, this probably comes from a lifetime of practice (especially considering where Doug’s father currently resides). But being good at what they do presents a blessing and a curse. For starters, it makes them part of something bigger that isn’t so easy to walk away from. The time Doug spends with Claire causes him to grow a bit of a conscience…but his seperate obligations to both Jem and Fergie make “doing the right thing” easier to want than it is to do.
Frawley on the other hand doesn’t give us much to draw on. We have no idea why he wants to be Boston’s Dudley Do-Right, we just know that he is. What makes him interesting is the fact that he’s very good at what he does. He calls Doug’s gang the “No Fucking Around Crew”, and vows to be the same. Hamm becomes a worthy foil, and especially flexes his muscles anytime he gets one of the Townies cornered. It’s a good coming-out party for Hamm, who shows that he’s more than just a guy who looks good smoking in a suit.
So great crooks, good foil, a captivating plot thread about a community that breeds crooks. Almost every element works beautifully, right? Wrong. Where the film lost me was in its final set piece in Fenway Park. the heist itself is a thing of beauty – hit the cash box of Fenway after a four game homestand against The Yankees. For the uninitiated, games between Red Sox and Yankees are wickedly hot tickets, and as Fergie points out, a hot ticket that will make for a lot of loot after the final out is called. Thus, the morning after, the merry men con their way into a cathedral of baseball to daringly take it down.
As a lover of Fenway Park, heist films and action scenes, this set-up sounds like a dream come true. Sadly, the set-up is completely wasted. Fenway, if you didn’t know is a truly unique structure, and the oldest of its kind in the entire country. It is both filled and surrounded with nooks, crannies, and character. So why the crux of the Heist gets set in the stadium’s loading dock is beyond me. What could have been a cat-and-mouse chase in and around columns, concourses, two decks and one 39 foot green wall was instead confined to one boring truck bay that could have been anywhere.
Once outside, the action stays on the same boring track, with a predictable resolution and a truly bad display of marksmanship by darned near everybody. The simplicity of these sequences wasn’t enough to sink the whole film for me, but it came damned close.
I recently asked a fellow blogger whether a lacklustre ending could sink an entire film. We were both in agreement that it really shouldn’t, and I’d offer up THE TOWN as my ‘Exhibit A’. While flawed, this movie makes good on the promise Affleck showed with his previous film GONE BABY GONE, and features some stellar acting by all involved, and some well thought out work behind the lens by Ben. Overall, THE TOWN’s construct is a good one – good enough to survive what I consider a pretty bad mis-step.