The Town (2010 film)

The Town
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Ben Affleck
Screenplay by	Ben Affleck Peter Craig Aaron Stockard
Story by	Chuck Hogan (Novel)
Produced by	Graham King Basil Iwanyk
Starring	Ben Affleck Jon Hamm Rebecca Hall Jeremy Renner Blake Lively Pete Postlethwaite Chris Cooper
Cinematography	Robert Elswit
Edited by	Dylan Tichenor
Music by	Harry Gregson-Williams David Buckley
Production companies	Legendary Pictures GK Films Thunder Road Film
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date	September 17, 2010 (2010-09-17)
Running time	123 minutes
Country	Template:Film US
Language	English
Budget	$37 million
Box office	$33,080,607

The Town is a 2010 crime film starring, co-written and directed by Ben Affleck that is based on Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves. The film opened in theaters in the United States on September 17, 2010 to rave reviews, with Rotten Tomatoes giving it a "Certified Fresh" rating with 95% positive critical reviews. In addition, the film opened at number one at the U.S. box office with more than $23 million.

The motion picture is one of a number of films set in Boston, Massachusetts over the past decade that have formed a "sub-genre" of crime movies, including Affleck's own Gone Baby Gone.

Plot

A team of four lifelong friends—Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck), James "Jem" Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), Albert "Gloansy" Magloan (Slaine), and Desmond "Dez" Elden (Owen Burke), from the tough streets of Charlestown, Massachusetts—rob a Cambridge bank at gunpoint. They take bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) hostage, soon learning that she lives four blocks from Gloansy. Jem wishes to confront her to see what she knows, but Doug fears that he will make things worse and takes on the assignment himself, eventually meeting up with her and asking her out on a date. Claire confesses that she is still traumatized by the robbery and tells Doug all about the experience. In later conversations with Claire, Doug reveals some of his personal life to her, in particular that his mother deserted his family when he was a young child, the strained relationship between him and his father who is now imprisoned, and mentions in passing that his mother had relatives in Tangerine, Florida, where she might have gone. The two form a deep relationship and Doug develops a strong, protective attachment to Claire.

Meanwhile, FBI agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm) is in charge of the case surrounding the robbery. He surveys the crew at a cookout following leads that point to their involvement, and realizes that they all work for Fergus 'Fergie' Colm (Peter Postlethwaite), a local florist in the Boston neighborhood. Doug is hesitant to undertake their next assignment, due to the professionalism of the guards and the higher risks associated with the taking on of the armored truck crew. His worries are confirmed during the robbery in the North End, where gunfire erupts. The police arrive quickly and a chase ensues; the team barely escapes. Frustrated, Agent Frawley demands that some evidence be found in their torched escape vehicle to justify bringing MacRay and his crew in for an interrogation.

After the FBI team finds justifiable evidence and brings the team in for questioning, Agent Frawley promises Doug that he will spend the rest of his life in prison. In a visit to his father (Chris Cooper) at the local federal prison, Doug reveals that he is planning on leaving Charlestown and asks his father why he never looked for his mother when she left them. His father becomes upset and abruptly ends the conversation, explaining that there was nothing to be found. When Jem approaches Doug with another job, he initially turns it down, explaining that he is leaving town and taking Claire with him. He then visits Fergie to tell him that he is not doing the job. Fergie tells him that he will, and explains that Doug's father worked for him and wanted out too. Instead, Fergie castrated him chemically and got Doug's mother hooked on drugs. He reveals that Doug's mother never left the family, instead telling him that she committed suicide in an anonymous burnout. He warns Doug that he will kill Claire if he doesn't do the job, which is revealed to be robbing Fenway Park.

Doug and Jem enter the stadium dressed as Boston police officers and trick the guards and counting room staff. They retrieve the money, change into EMT uniforms, and prepare to leave in an ambulance. Meanwhile the FBI was tipped off and have surrounded the entire building. Jem spies some SWAT officers inside the building with them and begins to shoot; Dez is killed. Realizing their desperate situation, Gloansy convinces Doug and Jem to put their cop uniforms back on and slip out while he creates a diversion. Gloansy bursts through the garage door in the ambulance and is killed while creating the diversion, but Agent Frawley quickly figures out the ruse and realizes Jem and Doug are still on the loose.

Frawley catches sight of Jem and tries to arrest him. Jem fires at Frawley and runs through the streets and initiating another massive firefight, during which he is killed. Doug escapes in a police cruiser, after witnessing Jem's death. He heads directly to Town Flowers and kills Fergie. From a building across the street from Claire's apartment, Doug calls her and asks her to come away with him. He sees that Agent Frawley and a team of FBI agents are with her, and that they are pressuring her to help lure him into a trap. She ends the conversation with a coded warning to him, which helps him realize that she still has feelings for him. Dressed as an MBTA bus driver, Doug slips through the net of police in Charlestown and drives a bus to Route 128 Amtrak station where he boards a southbound train.

Meanwhile, Claire finds a bag full of money along with a tangerine that Doug buried in a community garden that she tends. A note in the bag explains that she should keep the money and that he's leaving town, and ends the letter with "I'll see you again, on this side or the other." Claire uses the money to finance, anonymously, the renovation of a run-down children's hockey rink and dedicates it to Doug's mother. The film ends with a shot of Doug looking over an estuary from the porch of a wooden house, presumably in Tangerine, Florida.

Cast

• Ben Affleck as Doug MacRay, a career criminal.
• Jon Hamm as Special Agent Adam Frawley, an FBI agent pursuing the team of criminals.
• Rebecca Hall as Claire Keesey, a bank manager who falls in love with Doug.
• Jeremy Renner as James "Jem" Coughlin, a member of Doug's team.
• Blake Lively as Krista Coughlin, the sister of Jem, and Doug's ex-girlfriend who has a 19-month-old daughter, Shyne.
• Chris Cooper as Stephen MacRay, Doug's father.
• Slaine as Albert "Gloansy" Magloan, a member of Doug's team.
• Titus Welliver as Dino Ciampa, Adam's FBI partner.
• Pete Postlethwaite as Fergie the Florist, crime boss in the town.
• Owen Burke as Desmond "Dez" Elden, a member of Doug's team.
• Christopher Norman, Jr. as Dre, a neighborhood drug dealer.

Production

Ben Affleck and Jon Hamm chat on the set in Cambridge, Massachusetts

The production began filming late August 2009 in Boston. The former MASSBank branch located in Melrose, Massachusetts was used as the location for the first robbery of the film, taking on the name Cambridge Merchants Bank (the exterior shots, however, are of Cambridge Savings Bank in Harvard Square). Filming also took place at Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Connecticut for casino scenes and Massachusetts Correctional Institution – Cedar Junction in Walpole, Massachusetts for use of their visiting room.

The movie was shown at the Venice Film Festival and premiered at Boston's Fenway Park.

Reception

The Town has received widespread critical acclaim. Review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes reports that 95% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 125 reviews, with an average score of 7.8/10. The critical consensus for the Certified Fresh film is: Tense, smartly written, and wonderfully cast, The Town proves that Ben Affleck has rediscovered his muse -- and that he's a director to be reckoned with. Roger Ebert gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, praising Jeremy Renner's performance and Affleck's direction. Xan Brooks, writing in The Guardian wrote that the movie is "a bogus, bull-headed enterprise" riddled with cliches. He described a scene in which Affleck and Renner, disguised as police officers, "come striding down the corridor in their smoked sunglasses and jaunty caps, with their legs apart and their shoulders swinging, like a pair of strippers en route to a hen night."

Several reviewers praised the film's action sequences. In his review for the New York Times, A. O. Scott commented on the opening heist, "That sequence, like most of the other action set pieces in the film, is lean, brutal and efficient, and evidence of Mr. Affleck’s skill and self-confidence as a director." Brooks, in The Guardian, wrote that the action sequences were "sharply orchestrated". Justin Chang wrote in Variety that the action scenes strike "an ideal balance between kineticism and clarity" aided by cinematographer Robert Elswit and film editor Dylan Tichenor.

Some critics commented on the film's similarity to Michael Mann's Heat. Writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Laremy Lengel titled his review "The Town Works Best if You Avoid the Heat".

As a Boston-based crime drama, the movie forms part of a "crime-movie subgenre" typically marked by "flavorsome accents, pungent atmosphere and fatalistic undertow", according to Chang. Within that subgenre, which includes The Departed, Mystic River and Affleck's Gone Baby Gone, The Town is more of a straightforward crime-procedural and has a more optimistic outlook, Chang wrote.

Box office

The film opened in United States theaters on September 17, 2010. It took first place at the box office during its opening weekend, taking in $23.8 million.

Charlestown, bank robbery and crime

A voice in the trailer of the movie says: "There are over 300 bank robberies in Boston every year. Most of these professionals live in a 1-square-mile neighborhood called Charlestown." In fact, there were 23 reported bank robberies in the entire state of Massachusetts in the first quarter of 2010, compared with 49 in Illinois and 136 in California, according to the FBI.

According to a September 2010 article in The Boston Globe, Charlestown was once known as an area where bank robbers were concentrated, but not since the mid-1990s, and the subject has been a sore point for Townies. Now much of the neighborhood has been gentrified. There was some sense of rivalry between "Townies", people who lived in the historically Irish-Catholic neighborhood for decades, and "Tunies", largely white-collar workers who arrived with gentrification, but most of that has died down, the newspaper reported.

In the early 1990s, a series of bank robberies and armored car robberies by Townies focused attention on Charlestown. In one heist in Hudson, New Hampshire, two guards were left dead. (The film mentions a New Hampshire armored-car robbery.) Charles Hogan got the idea for his novel, on which the movie is based, in 1995. "It was just so remarkable that this one very small community was the locus for bank robbers," he said, but he was very aware that crime was only one part of the community, and he didn't want to make all residents of the neighborhood look like criminals. At the movie's premiere, Affleck made a similar statement: "Charlestown isn’t full of bank robbers and Dorchester isn’t full of bad guys and Southie isn’t full of math geniuses or bad people."

Jack O'Callahan, a Charlestown native born in 1957, said there was an element of crime in Charlestown when he grew up there, "But it didn’t bleed into the neighborhood. And those guys were pretty good parents who went to church on Sundays. They were gangsters, but they were good neighbors."

Other films prominently featuring Charlestown include Blown Away (1994) and Monument Ave. (1998).

See also

• The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), in which the main character is a bank robber in Boston
• Recent crime films based in or near Boston:
  • Blown Away (1994), parts of which take place in Charlestown
  • The Boondock Saints (1999), set in South Boston
  • The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day (2009), set in Ireland and South Boston
  • The Departed (2006), concentrating on criminals from South Boston
  • Gone Baby Gone (2007), based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, directed and produced by Ben Affleck
  • Mystic River (2003), based on a novel by Lehane
  • Shutter Island (2010), based on a novel by Lehane

External links

• Official website
• The Town at AllMovie
• The Town at Box Office Mojo
• The Town at IMDb
• The Town at Rotten Tomatoes