Reviewing The Town

From now on, I will lower my expectations going into every movie I see, no matter how promising and exciting a trailer looks.  I will fight the urge to let my adrenaline start pumping and put a hold on my imagination running wild with a movie’s potential because, ultimately, after 100 years of moviemaking Hollywood has few new and electrifying ideas to offer the general public.  Sure, technology occasionally progresses enough to provide us a new outlet, like Avatar did with 3D or The Matrix with bullet time photography, but in general it is the same plots being regurgitated with new actors for a new generation of viewers.  That’s not to say movies with rehashed plots and predictable outcomes can’t be enjoyable.  Take this year’s Academy Award nominated film The Fighter.  The acting in that movie is so stupendous that I could look past the fact that yet another boxing movie had been made.
I state all of this because I watched Ben Affleck’s The Town last night and was underwhelmed at the final product.  The story seemed very reminiscent of Michael Mann’s 1995 crime thriller Heat.  The acting ranged from average to pretty good.  The accents of the Bostonian characters seemed too preposterous to be believed for anyone who hasn’t resided in Charlestown.  It doesn’t matter if they were so authentic one couldn’t recognize who was really from the area, like Affleck, and who wasn’t, like Jeremy Renner and Blake Lively, at times it seemed like a Saturday Night Live sketch was going on and the joke was the over-the-top accents.  The characterization of supporting characters was weak and the relationship between Affleck and Renner’s parts was never really fleshed out fully.
Overall, it just wasn’t the heist/crime/relationship drama I was expecting and only one scene really had me tense up wondering what was going to happen next.  This is not to say Affleck didn’t do a serviceable job both in front of and behind the camera.  It just never seemed like his creation, instead picking and choosing moments and ideas from previous movies and intertwining them into a new creation.  Had I been given a little more insight into Renner’s psyche, some more scenes showing the relationship between Affleck and Renner, and a smidgen more enlightenment on the work the FBI was doing to hunt the bad guys it might have been a more complete film.  I realize the movie was more about the relationship between a bank robber and the unknowing hostage he begins to date after the crime, but you still need some additional plotlines to help flesh out the movie more.
On a scale of 10, The Town gets a 6, putting it on par with movies like The Departed, Ocean’s Thirteen, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The Town is slightly above average, worth watching once.