- UK release: September 2010
- Director: Ben Affleck · Writers: Peter Craig, Ben Affleck, Aaron Stockard
- Studio / distributor: Warner Bros.; Legendary Pictures; GK Films
- Genre: Crime thriller / heist drama · Runtime: 125 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Ben Affleck (Good Will Hunting) as Doug MacRay; Rebecca Hall (The Prestige) as Claire Keesey; Jon Hamm (Mad Men) as Special Agent Adam Frawley; Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) as James “Jem” Coughlin; Blake Lively (Gossip Girl) as Krista Coughlin
- Source: based on the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan
- Rotten Tomatoes: 93% critics / 85% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
Three years ago, Gone Baby Gone arrived and quietly made the case that Ben Affleck, by then better known for tabloid romance and a run of forgettable leading roles, could direct. That film was a careful, morally tangled kidnapping drama, and the surprise was how steady a hand it showed. The Town is the follow-up, and it answers the obvious question, whether the first one was luck, with a flat no. This time Affleck directs and takes the lead himself, and he does the harder thing: he makes a heist thriller that hits every beat you expect and still feels like it belongs to him.
The setup
Doug MacRay runs a four-man crew of armed robbers out of Charlestown, a square mile of Boston that the film tells us, only half joking, has produced more bank and armoured-car thieves than anywhere else in the country. A job goes slightly wrong, the crew briefly takes a bank manager, Claire Keesey, as a hostage, and then lets her go unharmed. Worried she can identify them, Doug starts following her, and the two fall into a relationship she does not realise is built on a lie. That alone would be enough rope to hang a thriller on. Around it sits an FBI investigation tightening by the day, a volatile best friend who would rather shoot his way out than walk away, and a neighbourhood that does not let people leave. Doug wants out. Almost nobody in his life will allow it.
The cast
Affleck casts himself well. Doug is a man of few words and fewer obvious tells, and Affleck plays him with a banked, watchful quality that suits both the character and his own slightly guarded screen presence. The performance that everyone will be talking about, though, is Jeremy Renner’s. Fresh from The Hurt Locker, he plays Jem as a coiled spring of loyalty and menace, the friend who would die for Doug and might get him killed in the process. Every scene he is in carries a charge of not knowing what he will do next.
Rebecca Hall gives Claire a fragile, genuine warmth that keeps the central deception from feeling like a plot device; you understand both why Doug cannot tell her and why he cannot stay away. Jon Hamm, stepping off television, brings a sharp, slightly arrogant intelligence to the FBI man closing in, and the film is smart enough not to make him a cartoon. Blake Lively turns up as Jem’s sister, a wrung-out single mother, and is barely recognisable in the part. The ensemble is the kind crime films live or die on, and this one is deep.
The craft
Robert Elswit shoots Charlestown as a real, lived-in place rather than a postcard, all triple-deckers and grey harbour light, and the geography of the city matters: you always know roughly where the crew is and where the law is. Affleck stages the set pieces with patience. A heist in the Fenway district, with the crew dressed for the occasion, is built and paid off with a control that few directors three films into a career manage. The action is loud and fast but never incoherent, and Affleck resists the temptation to cut it into confetti.
What raises the film above competent genre work is its restraint. It is in no hurry, it trusts silences, and it lets character drive the robberies rather than the other way round. The Boston accents, the Catholic guilt, the loyalty codes that double as a trap, all of it is specific. The score sits back and lets the tension build. At a little over two hours the film earns its length.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Heat, and The Town invites it: the cop and the thief circling each other, the professional crew, the woman who pulls one of them toward a normal life. Affleck is not yet operating at Michael Mann’s level of cold formal grandeur, and his film is warmer and more rooted in one place than Mann’s sprawling Los Angeles. Set beside Point Break, another tale of an undercover-adjacent bond between hunter and hunted, The Town is the more grown-up film, less interested in adrenaline than in the question of whether a man can change. And it sits comfortably next to The Departed as part of a small wave of Boston crime pictures, sharing that film’s sense of a city where everyone is from the same few streets. The Town lacks Scorsese’s operatic scale but matches him for texture.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting around 93%, with the praise landing where you would expect: the performances, the action, Affleck’s growing confidence behind the camera. Audiences are warm too, a little lower at 85%, and the most common reservation on both sides is that the story is familiar. That is fair. You can see the shape of the ending coming, and the romance asks you to grant it a fair amount of goodwill. But familiarity is not the same as staleness, and a heist film does not need to reinvent the form to be excellent. What this one does is execute a known structure with unusual care.
Verdict
This is exactly the kind of film I return to. It is tense, beautifully made, full of strong performances, and grounded in a place that feels real, and it has the rewatch quality the best crime thrillers share, where you go back for the craft and the company rather than the surprise. The script does not break new ground, and the central relationship occasionally strains belief. None of that costs it much. Affleck has made a genre picture good enough to confirm that Gone Baby Gone was no accident, and Renner walks off with several scenes. One of the most assured crime films in years, and one I will happily watch again. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas from September 2010.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Affleck went on to win the Best Picture Oscar for Argo (2012), making The Town look in hindsight like the hinge between the promise of Gone Baby Gone and a fully established directing career. Renner’s stock rose sharply too, into the Mission: Impossible and Marvel franchises. The film’s reputation has only firmed up; it is now routinely cited as one of the best heist thrillers of its decade and an obvious touchstone for later entries such as Den of Thieves. An extended cut with a longer, bleaker finale circulates on disc and is worth seeking out. It streams on the major platforms depending on region, and is widely available on Blu-ray and 4K.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Detailed content advice could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing. The age rating shown is the film’s UK certificate (15), confirmed against the research dossier; the BBFC classifies The Town at 15 for strong language and violence. The full category-by-category Content Advice will be added once the BBFC release page can be confirmed.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
