Film review: The Town

A big, ambitious action crime thriller, The Town trades Gone Baby Gone's contemplative, mournful mood for a faster pace and smashing set pieces. It's a smart, bold genre exercise that's enormous fun to watch, harking back to gritty urban thrillers of the 1970s with an assured sense of tone and style.

Adopting the director's prerogative, Affleck has cast himself in The Town's lead role of Doug MacRay, a native of Boston's tough Irish Charlestown neighbourhood, which as an opening title card informs us, has produced more bank and armoured car robberies than any place in the United States. Doug and his best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) are lifelong members of one of Charlestown's most notorious and successful crews, a team that methodically goes about its thuggish business with a combination of workaday professionalism and swift, vicious violence.

When the guys rob a bank and take a manager hostage, the episode sparks a series of events that leads Doug to question whether he's ready to leave Charlestown's tribal life of murder and mayhem.

Meanwhile, he's being pursued by an FBI agent (Jon Hamm) who's determined to make the choice for him. Let it be noted that The Town, based on the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan, doesn't break any new narrative ground.

Doug's sensitive bad guy contemplating one last job before he goes clean evokes countless Hollywood clichés . But if Affleck is all too willing to make his character a too-good-to-be-true paragon of moral ambivalence, he still manages to infuse Doug's struggle with touches of recognisable realism, especially by way of the characters he surrounds himself with.

Renner, whose breakout performance in The Hurt Locker last year earned him a deserved Oscar nod, brings a similar brand of volatile energy to the borderline psychotic Jem, whose filial loyalty Doug both appreciates and abhors. Rebecca Hall, as the bank manager the boys abduct, brings a welcome note of understated grace to an otherwise testosterone-driven exercise in male bonding and fraternal rituals.

Blake Lively has a few juicy scenes as Jem's hard-living sister, reminiscent of Amy Ryan's indelible anti-heroine in Gone Baby Gone.

With its heists, fights, car chases and kick-in-the-pants climax set at Fenway Park, The Town lets action, staging and canny editing tell the story. The Town has a lot going for it: terrific cast, good writing, some nifty psychological reversals.