REVIEW: Ben Affleck Narrowly Misses Greatness with The Town

Particularly in his interactions with Jem, recently sprung after nine years locked up and seething with purposeless energy, the disparity between their criminal personas -- and their level of commitment to them -- is a source of tension. A recovering addict working the program, Doug isn't a bred-in-the-bone thug, although that's what his peers want him to be, if only so he doesn't amount to anything better; what he does is often wrong, but he knows he's not bad. Jem, on the other hand, has rotted to his core. How he got that way only matters insofar as it suggests that it is possible for behavior to turn one's nature away from itself; is it only a matter of time before Doug's pile-up of wrongs overwhelm him?

Robbing a bank, for instance: probably not a great choice, though there are worse things he could do, as Jem's impulses helpfully point out. When Doug begins stalking and then wooing Claire (Rebecca Hall), the comely manager whom the masked quartet took as a hostage after robbing her bank, it's clearly the wrong decision, even if it prevents something bad (i.e., something Jem-related) from happening. It's also quite stupid, as Jem points out after discovering Doug dining with his new, secretly acquired girlfriend, and plays both of them like an Irish fiddle. Part of the film's thrilling first hour, the scene is a beautifully calibrated triumph for Affleck the director, and a tour de force for Renner, who seems to carry in his squat, springy frame and glowing eyes both the repulsion and the allure of someone truly, violently unpredictable.

"You've got a card," Doug tells Claire early on, playing dumb after she confesses that she has an identifying detail that she kept from the police. "You don't need to play it right away." My heart swelled a bit at that line (the novel was adapted by Affleck, Peter Craig, and Aaron Stockard for the screen) and its tantalizing suggestion of a smart, morally engaged, enigmatically self-aware tear through the heist genre. Hall, who as Claire radiates bland, girly goodness but also a measure of the self-preservation that her clueless, seduced witness counterpart in the recently TIFF-screened version of Brighton Rock lacked, is an outsider, and is initially used to telegraph the demographic flux that has set so many of the townie crews on edge. And yet that card of Claire's, along with most of the potential for an explosive second half that Affleck coils into the first, feels squandered; instead we get an imitation of a lesser, more literal shoot 'em up climax.

It's after a seriously awesome backstreet chase through some of Boston's narrow, urban corridors that the heists -- which become the focus instead of the backdrop to the perfectly serviceable primary story -- are subject to diminishing returns. Jon Hamm puts his G-Man genes to good use as FBI agent Adam Frawley, whose grudge against Doug's elite, elusive crew becomes personal, Pete Postlethwaite has a starved, awful potency as The Florist, an old world lynchpin to whom all Charlestown crews are in thrall, and Blake Lively has a couple of believably bleary moments as the designated trashy wild card with whom Doug has fathered a child.

While his actors are well used, Affleck makes the most of his big budget toys: Doug keeps agreeing to bigger and badder heists for reasons that make sense on the genre's terms but not the film's. By the time he's plotting to knock over Fenway Park, the narrative's energy slackens, though the action set pieces hum along on an independent generator. Affleck, whose features seem to have sharpened and settled into a kind of handsome, adult repose, offers a still but imposing, centering presence in a small, chaotic corner of a pretty tough world. I'm talking about Charlestown, though if he'd just play those cards right, I could see him sliding those big shoulders into the ranks of the Hollywood greats.

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