Wednesday 20th October 2010

The Town

Director: Ben Affleck
Year: 2010
Stars: Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Jon Hamm

Having read some very positive reviews of this movie, I decided it sounded good enough to go and see at the cinema. Directed by Ben Affleck, it is, at its most basic level, a gangster/ heist movie. Thankfully, there's a bit more to it than that.

Affleck is Doug Macray, a guy who is the mastermind behind a number of bank robberies, but who is (if you believe the film) basically a nice guy really. Rebecca Hall is Claire Keesey, the bank manager of one of the banks Macray and his gang robs. As the film goes on, their lives just get more intertwined until there's basically no going back.

I enjoyed The Town massively. It kept me interested, focussing not just on the plot but on the characters and their backgrounds. There were, perhaps, some flaws in the characterisation of certain people (for example, if Macray was such a good guy, why did he keep robbing banks? This was touched upon, but not with any real conviction) - but you could make up your own reasons for a lot of this and, for me at least, it didn't ruin the movie. I think Dan had more issues - but the fact that there was so much to discuss after the film ended (and that we both had such strong, if contradictory, reactions to the characters), makes me feel that there's a lot of reasons to watch The Town.

Rating: 4 out of 5