Argo

Ben Affleck's Argo (2012) is a pleasingly creative thriller. Part "incredible true story" satire and part intense thriller, it depicts a truly bizarre scenario: a Hollywood-CIA conspiracy to rescue refugees from the Iran Hostage Crisis. Besides its timeliness with recent Middle East violence, it's a cracking good movie.

Six American diplomats escape the Iranian takeover of America's embassy in 1979. While the world focuses on the greater hostage crisis, CIA extractor Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) focuses on rescuing these six from the Canadian embassy. His plan: disguise the hostages as a Canadian film crew scouting locations in Iran. This involves convincing Hollywood producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) and makeup man John Chambers (John Goodman) to manufacture Argo, a science fiction epic with a screenplay, advertisements and even a press event. The early stages work flawlessly, but indecision by the hostages, executive meddling and suspicious Iranians make their getaway no easy task.

Like Charlie Wilson's War, Argo's covert ops are an expose reshaped as farce. Hollywood (or at least a chunk of it) is shown in bed with the US government, who engineer a dummy film with no one batting an eye. At the end, when higher-ups call off the plan, Mendez disobeys orders, short-circuiting the whole chain of command. At the end, the CIA successfully covers its tracks, allowing Canada to take credit. Beyond a fleeting reference to the Mossadegh coup, Affleck opts not to probe the story's darker implications.

And why should he? The story's mix of farce and derring-do deserves celebration. Affleck and writer Chris Terrio provide a perfect balancing act, mixing satire with thrills. The Hollywood scenes crackle with pointed barbs, with Siegel and Chambers using bluff and guile to arrange a "fake hit." The best scene has Siegel confronting a hack screenwriter whose value is exponentially inflated by the crisis. Unionized and cliquish Hollywood proves thornier than the Ayatollah's regime.

Argo flawlessly shifts gears in the second half. We get glimpses of Iranian repression to raise the stakes, while early exposition establishes the Carter Administration's uneasiness with Mendez's plan. Afraid of an embarrassing catastrophe, the State Department nearly scrubs Mendez's plan. The last half hour is an exercise in tension, with brilliant inter-cutting between the hostages's escape, bureaucratic muddle and near-misses with Iranian authorities. It's amazingly gripping, so intense that the sappy finale barely registers.  

Ben Affleck's wooden acting isn't too big a drawback: playing an intense G-Man minimizes his woodenness. John Goodman and Alan Arkin are perfectly cast as archly cynical movie big shots: their scenes are alone worth the ticket price. Bryan Cranston gets a meaty role as Mendez's boss. The excellent supporting cast includes Victor Garber, Bob Gunton, Phillip Baker Hall, Zeljko Ivanek, Titus Welliver and Isabelle Adjani.

Argo is a resounding success. It proves again that Ben Affleck should stay behind the camera instead of take up space in front of it.

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.