16 Years Ago Today: Ben Affleck Gave Audiences One Of The Best Crime Thrillers Ever Made
by Devin Meenan · /FilmAdd SlashFilm on Google:
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By the early-mid 2000s, Ben Affleck's reputation as an actor was in a bad place. A series of blockbuster flops (from "Pearl Harbor" to "Daredevil" to the infamous "Gigli") created the sense he was a lazy performer coasting on bad parts and his pretty looks. Tabloid overexposure, too, made audiences sick of him. So perhaps it's not surprising that Affleck didn't pull off his comeback by acting, but by directing.
In 2007, he directed "Gone Baby Gone," adapting Bostonian author Dennis Lehane's mystery novel, and starring his little brother Casey Affleck as private investigator Patrick Kenzie. Affleck's choice of leading man made sense; he obviously knew (how to work with) his own brother extremely well, while the younger Affleck carried none of his big bro's baggage. Speaking to Collider in 2007, Ben Affleck also admitted he found the idea of starring in and directing the movie to be "daunting." But doing both is exactly what Affleck did for his next, even more ambitious directorial effort — and the results were pretty spectacular.
See "The Town," which hit theaters on this day in September 2010. Like "Gone Baby Gone," it adapts a Boston-set crime thriller, specifically Chuck Hogan's novel "Prince of Thieves" (with some differences, like a movie theater robbery set piece being cut from the film). Affleck plays Doug MacRay, leader of a four-man bank robbery crew in Boston neighborhood Charlestown. Doug is considering leaving the town, especially since he's been seeing Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall). The catch? Claire is the manager of the last bank he and his guys robbed, and who then they blindfolded and briefly kidnapped. Criminals trying to keep their career a secret from their wives/girlfriends is a very common sight in crime movies, but it's rarely as big a ticking time bomb as this.
The Town is Affleck's heist movie masterpiece
According to reporting by The Ringer, the title went from "Prince of Thieves" to "The Town" because nobody wanted the audience thinking of Kevin Costner's Robin Hood. "The Town" is not exactly a striking title (not that it hurt the film's box office, which saw a $154 million gross), but it's a thematically fitting one. It's a cliche to say a story makes its own setting into a character but that is 100% true here.
In the 1990s, Charlestown developed a reputation as a home for bank and armored car robberies. That's no longer true, but "The Town" builds itself on said reputation. (The film's trailer includes a voiceover making the highly exaggerated claim that there are over 300 bank robberies in Boston every year.) Doug and his crew are all depicted as not just career robbers, but as descending from generations of stick-up men. "The Town" is the classic story of a working class man dreaming bigger than just stepping into his dad's shoes — except this time, those shoes come with an M16 and a ski mask.
"The Town" depicting Charlestown as "the bank robbery capital of America" is admittedly anachronistic, whereas "Prince of Thieves" the novel is a 1996-set period piece, one that dramatizes the recent history of Charlestown's gentrification. One face of that change is FBI agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm), who is on Doug's crew like a bloodhound. Michael Mann's "Heat" is an undeniable influence on "The Town" but that film presents the cop and robber as kindred spirits on opposite sides of the law. Frawley is the sort of yuppie who townies like Doug hate on sight, and that he's trying to put Doug away heats the tension up to scorching levels. No "Heat"-esque mutual-understanding-over-coffee scene here!
The Town proved Ben Affleck had the juice as a director
The movie is called "The Town" (i.e. a community), and its ensemble is indeed its greatest strength, cementing Affleck as an actor's director. Jeremy Renner gives a career-best performance as Doug's unstable best friend James "Jem" Coughlin, and Rebecca Hall is characteristically excellent as Claire — especially once she learns of Doug's deception. (The theatrical cut lets Doug off the hook, but an alternate ending feels more just; his "romance" with Claire was victimizing her twice over.) The late Pete Postlethwaite gives one of his last performances as Fergie Colm, a mob boss with a day job as a florist. Let's just say no man has ever looked scarier while pruning flowers.
As "Heat" does with Neil McCauley's crew, "The Town" depicts Doug and co. as smarter than the average crook. The opening robbery sequence includes details like them throwing security camera tapes in an office microwave, or dumping bleach all over the bank lobby (a trick that some real robbers tried to copy). But "The Town" is sure to add some cinematic flair to the heists.
The action scenes in the movie are more complex than anything Affleck pulled off in "Gone Baby Gone." There's a car chase through the streets of Charlestown around halfway through the movie, and later a siege when the crew tries to rob Fenway Park (practically treason for Bostonians). But Affleck constructs that action with the skill of a more experienced director. Then there's the costuming. From "The Dark Knight" to "Point Break," robbers with eccentric masks is nothing new, but "The Town" raises the standard. To rob an armored car, Doug and Jem dress as latex-masked nuns — if there's one thing no one has forgotten about "The Town," it's that.