“The Town,” Ben Affleck’s sophomore writing/directing effort after the provocative “Gone Baby Gone,” moves through every scene with the force of a machine.
Based on Chuck Hogan’s novel, “Prince of Thieves,” every gear and part of “The Town” has sharpness to it, complemented with a palette of visual flourishes that seize the audience’s attention.
Affleck’s performance as Doug McKray isn’t easy for the audience to forget. McKray wants to escape the vice of Charlestown, wants to escape a life of robbing banks in Boston. At least, that’s what we’re left to assume.
“The Town,” as a studio machine, retains an attachment to a forced narrative with mechanical characters.
For some reason, Jon Hamm of AMC’s “Mad Men,” plays a larger-than-necessary role as FBI Agent, Adam Frawley, who sticks around only to instigate the two entertaining but outstretched chase and shootout scenes.
It’s as if the story was built around these two action sequences.
It substitutes arbiters of external conflict, like Frawley, for a compelling crumb of internal conflict in McKray.
He wants out, but such a story can’t express the emotional foundation if the character only runs around shooting instead of revealing the conflict with his environment.
When we do see some of this, the film is almost there. Like when McKray talks with Coughlin (a volatile Jeremy Renner) at his house, the cemetery and when they don hockey masks on a vigilante mission.
McKray’s environment shows its other faces in Coughlin’s sister, Krista (Blake Lively, fantastic and underused) whose affection for McKray and her daughter try to keep him in the familiar but criminal confines of Charlestown.
There’s a similar scene between McKray and his father (Chris Cooper as only Chris Cooper can do) in prison. There are overhead shots of Charlestown recalling an inescapable maze.
Pete Postlewaite plays McKray’s “boss,” Fergus “Fergie” Colm and he plays the part with a delectable malice, viciously snipping roses in his flower shop.
Like what “The Town” could have been, especially without its third act high jinks, the scene is well-acted, intense and teases us with an untold narrative about a man who cannot escape.
