Boston Illegal

Okay, Boston. I get it. You are loyal, you are proud, and you are segmented as an ant’s thorax. Some of you don’t pronounce your R’s, most of you don’t take shit from anyone, and all of you worship your Sox.

It’s a funny place. It steeps in the brain fluids and doesn’t drain out. Everyone is vocal about his hometown, but Bostonians seem especially so. And Ben Affleck, for better or for worse one of its most famous alumni, can’t seem to let it go professionally. All three of his major non-acting credits—as director for “Gone Baby Gone”, co-writer for “Good Will Hunting,” and now director for “The Town”—have been not only set in Boston but are very much about Boston. What’s next Benny? It’s going to be hard to find someone ugly enough for the Larry Bird biopic.

Apparently, though, despite the prevailing pride, the whole point is to get out.

Just as Will Hunting skedaddled to see about his lady, Doug MacRay (Affleck), flawed hero of “The Town,” is all set to depart as well—with his lady. He just has to do it without dying. Tougher than it sounds.

You see, Doug is a bank robber—a pretty good one. He decided to be that because his daddy was that, and that’s just the way things are done in Charlestown. The movie opens with his biggest score yet. He and his boys, dressed in menacing crypt masks and robes, knock off a bank and wind up taking the assistant manager (Rebecca Hall, “Vicky Christina Barcelona”) as an “insurance” hostage. They let her go, but she’s shaken up.

The score is big enough that the FBI rears its ugly head—well, I guess not so ugly in this case, represented by Mr. Jon Hamm—and is soon breathing down Doug & Co’s necks. Then, in an unlikely and perhaps dispensable turn, Doug falls into a romantic relationship with the assistant manager he’d abducted and finds himself in the old “Do I tell her I’m a bad guy?” predicament we’ve seen in “Heat” and “The Departed.”

His newfound love as impetus, Doug suddenly wants out of the racket, out of the city, out of his life of beer with his buddies and comically unfulfilling sex with his increasingly violent best friend’s slutty sister (Blake Lively, her attempted Boston accent sounding like the gauzy, drugged-out expulsions of someone who’s just had her wisdom teeth removed).

However, “The Florist” (Pete Postlethwaite, excellently), the man financing these crimes in exchange for a cut, is not prepared to just let his best money-making mule go and see about a girl. Emerging as a very effective villain late in the film, he threatens Doug into doing one last job for him by invoking the fate of his fair lady.

This is going to sound wacky, but what “The Town” lacks in plausibility, it makes up for in realism. It runs into plausibility issues with the romance and with Doug’s ability to, as an ex hockey player, outsmart the FBI. But these are plot points. The actual execution of the action is very well done, the car chases riveting but not frantic, the robbery scenes full of real-life problems, and the dialogue brimming with profanity. Affleck doesn’t go for the slick, improbable caper as the Ocean’s movies did.  He asks himself, “How would this really go down?” and he shoots it.  

The issue that prevents Affleck’s latest effort from being an excellent movie is character development. Despite its length, none of the characters is fleshed out enough to care about him. For example, I would not have been upset if Douggie had gone down at the end–to jail or otherwise. In fact, it may have made a better film.

Because of the overarching lack of real connection to the people on screen, most of the suspense of the movie came not from “Oh my God, is he going to get shot?” but “Oh my God, if she found out he was the skeleton dude who abducted her it would be soooooo awkward!” That’s not cops-n-robbers suspense. That’s rom-com suspense. And Boston is the wrong place for that.