The Town

Ben Affleck's new film is solid if unspectacular. Basically Heat with Boston accents, The Town is a good enough heist film if you're not looking for anything original or innovative.

Doug Macray (Ben Affleck) is a troubled NHL washout living in the Boston suburb of Charlestown. With his crew - including hot-headed buddy Jim (Jeremy Renner) - Doug engages in a series of robberies, including a bank heist which results in manager Claire Kessey (Rebecca Hall) being taken hostage. Things become complicated when Doug meets Claire and falls for her, while hard-nosed FBI Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) works to track Doug down. With his newfound relationship, Doug is ready to go straight, but inevitably finds himself pulled into a last job for crime boss Fergie Colm (Pete Postlethwaite) - a robbery of Fenway Park.

The Town contains little you haven't seen before. The usual tropes and archetypes of the heist genre are trotted out - the conflicted, somewhat-reluctant leader, the naive love interest, the trigger-happy sidekick, the "last job" that goes awry. The film begs comparison with Michael Mann's Heat (1995), one of the genre's masterpieces, and comes off poorly: aside from Doug and Claire the characters are one-note ciphers, and every plot point is extremely predictable. An innovative, strikingly original film this is not.

Still, Affleck makes the most of his fairly conventional story. He makes the lead characters sympathetic, and provides fine direction that makes the film compelling despite its cliches. The action scenes are excellent, especially the armored-car heist at mid-point, and Affleck makes fine use of his Boston locations. Aside from a banal score by Harry Gregson-Williams and David Buckley, there's little to complain about on a technical score, and the movie definitely retains interest throughout.

Ben Affleck gives one of his better performances here, with the right mixture of toughness and vulnerability. The ravishing Rebecca Hall (Frost/Nixon) is endearing as the requisite love interest, and Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) is well-cast as the resident psycho. Pete Postlethwaite (In the Name of the Father) is superb in a slimy villain role, making up for his forgettable bit in Inception. On the other hand, Jon Hamm (TV's Mad Men) and Titus Welliver (Rough Riders) are one-note as Doug's adversaries, and Chris Cooper gets a dud of a cameo.

All things considered, though, The Town is good enough for what it is. It's difficult to complain about cliches when the movie succeeds at what it tries to do, and you can certainly find worse ways to spend an afternoon.