The Town (2010)
Directed by Ben Affleck
A proficient group of thieves rob a bank and hold the manager hostage. Things begin to get complicated when one of the crew members falls in love with her.
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38 films that influenced The Town
What critics say influenced The Town
Affleck combines visceral excitement, bracing authenticity, and an ambiance of malice and dread to make what might be the best movie set in Boston since The Friends of Eddie Coyle — and that includes his own Gone Baby Gone .
He includes a nod to that decade's Boston-set "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," a melancholy crime drama that would have laughed this movie's sentimental ending right into the Charles River.
The script by Affleck, Peter Craig , and Aaron Stockard , based on the novel "Prince of Thieves" by Chuck Hogan , draws less on life than on other, similarly themed movies, especially " The Departed ."
The title of the The Town, which is based on the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan and adapted by Peter Craig, Affleck, and Aaron Stockard (who also worked on Gone Baby Gone, refers to Charlestown, a square-mile neighborhood in Boston that opening title cards inform us is responsible for producing more bank and armored truck robbers than any other place in the United States.
Affleck takes the Clint Eastwood/Kevin Costner/Mel Gibson route by directing and starring in "The Town," a taut adaptation of the Chuck Hogan novel "Prince of Thieves."
(“The Town” was adapted from “Prince of Thieves” by Chuck Hogan.)
A worthy if decidedly less ambitious effort from actor-turned-director Ben Affleck, "The Town" doesn't quite match the thematic complexity or moral ambiguity that made his first feature, 2007's " Gone Baby Gone ," or 2006's like-minded " The Departed " so very good.
Like Martin Scorsese’s The Departed or James Gray’s We Own the Night, The Town is a deliberately old-fashioned melodrama that echoes the pulpy mix of violence and romanticism of gangster films of the Thirties and Forties.
The Town never reaches the operatic heights of the movie to which it will inevitably compared, The Departed, but it's a solid improvement on the plothole-riddled Gone Baby Gone, and sports so many quality performances that miraculously don't drown each other out.
The script by Affleck, Peter Craig , and Aaron Stockard , based on the novel "Prince of Thieves" by Chuck Hogan , draws less on life than on other, similarly themed movies, especially " The Departed ."
The British producer clearly recognised elements in Chuck Hoganâ??s novel that reminded him of his biggest success thus far, Martin Scorseseâ??s The Departed, likewise a Boston-set story pitting cops and mobsters against one another.
As a classic Hollywood thriller it succeeds on most levels, the cop vs criminal interplay is not as thought out as it could have been but its evocation of Boston rivals Martin Scorsese’s urban gangster drama The Departed.
The film is reminiscent of the 1995 Michael Mann drama "Heat," striking a similar tone.
Unfortunately, like "Heat," "The Town" kind of whiffs it in the male-female relations department, though in Affleck's case it hurts his movie more than it hurt Michael Mann's.
Based on a novel by Chuck Hogan, the plot may be similar to Michael Mann's Heat but the film is much more intimate, focussing so tightly on the relationships between the characters that action scenes feel almost like distractions.
It is a classically structured thriller, bringing elements from the masterpieces of the heist genre especially Michael Mann’s Heat and sticking to some of those hammered old cliches: the dynamic between Cop and Criminal, the final job before fleeing to Mexico with the cash, the corrupting factor among the crooks etc.
In the pantheon of serious-minded heist films, The Town is a respectable addition, falling beneath the bar set by Michael Mann's Heat but alongside 2008's The Bank Job.
It comes up short in that category thanks to Jon Hamm’s stock performance as the FBI agent on their tale, Hamm severely lacking the “pop” of other dogged law men before him (Al Pacino in Heat , Mark Ruffalo in Collateral).
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Boston challenges Chicago (The French Connection, 1971) and San Francisco (Bullitt, 1968) as a setting of unforgettable car chases.
Affleck�s car chases achieve the high quality set by Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971), the two films against which all subsequent car chases must be measured.
Near the middle of the film there is a botched armored truck heist that leads to a hectic police chase through the narrow streets and back alleys of Boston, and the film’s climax involves an attempt to rob the cash coming out of Fenway Park, both of which Affleck and cinematographer Robert Elswit (who won an Oscar for 2007’s There Will Be Blood) stage and film with the kind of shaky, verite-style intensity that William Friedkin used so memorably in The French Connection (1971).
So much for subtext, but I can’t argue with the result: the sequence rivals the classic scenes in Bullitt and The French Connection , and it makes you wonder why no one’s shot something like that in this labyrinthine neighborhood before.
Only the car chases, which have an amazing spatial sense and clarity are reminiscent of a director Affleck’s worked with, John Frankenheimer (on Reindeer Games), and that’s simply because Frankenheimer was a master of the car chase (Ronin, Grand Prix).
Think of it as “Ronin,” American-style.
Boston challenges Chicago (The French Connection, 1971) and San Francisco (Bullitt, 1968) as a setting of unforgettable car chases.
Affleck�s car chases achieve the high quality set by Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971), the two films against which all subsequent car chases must be measured.
So much for subtext, but I can’t argue with the result: the sequence rivals the classic scenes in Bullitt and The French Connection , and it makes you wonder why no one’s shot something like that in this labyrinthine neighborhood before.
I mean we cheered Bonnie and Clyde because we saw them rob the big banks but let customers keep their own money; we cheered Al Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon” because we really came to empathize with him; and we sympathized with the prisoners in “In the Name of the Father” because we saw the role politics and coerced confessions played in their convictions.
So we get a good heist movie that can be filed alongside genre classics like Heat and Dog Day Afternoon, along with one of the year’s better love stories.
(Disabling cell phones wasnâ??t a problem that Al Pacino and John Cazale ever had to confront in Dog Day Afternoon.)
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"The Great Train Robbery" from 1903), there have been movies about thieves and the law enforcement officers after them.
Like Martin Scorsese’s The Departed or James Gray’s We Own the Night, The Town is a deliberately old-fashioned melodrama that echoes the pulpy mix of violence and romanticism of gangster films of the Thirties and Forties.
In this way it shares a similar look and atmosphere to James Gray’s films such as The Yards and We Own the Night.