The Town

Brilliant movies 'Mystic River' and 'Gone Baby Gone' have established the city of Boston in the pantheon of crime capitals and now we have 'The Town' adding to Boston's reputation but disappointingly not matching the brilliance of it's predecessors.

Mad Man de jour FBI Agent, Jon Hamm, is in pursuit of anti-hero Ben Affleck who is the bank robber with a conscience. The film opens with the information that Charlestown ('The Town'), a locality in Boston, has the greatest number of bank robberies of any area in the world. I don't know whether this is fact or fiction but either way that premise troubled me throughout the film because I could not understand why the banks there would be as comparatively underprotected as represented in the film. Nor could I understand how the FBI would be so sloppy in exposing their use of a key witness as a lure later on.

Indeed why was the FBI even involved? My understanding was that the FBI could only be involved in crime that crossed state borders (ie national) and nothing in the film indicated that the crime was anything but local but examining Wikipedia afterwards I see that the FBI's investigative priorities 8 and 9 make it's involvement plausible.

No-one in this film is particularly likeable - unless you have an especially malevolent streak - even the film's heroine, a bank robbery victim, who fails to reveal crucial information to the authorities which would have prevented all manner of crime and mayhem that ensues. Of course, in that event there would have been no story - or at least, not this story.

Not a bad film if you can take the violence on offer but not top drawer either.