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The Town (2010 film)

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The Town
Theatrical release poster
Directed byBen Affleck
Screenplay byBen Affleck
Peter Craig
Aaron Stockard
Produced byGraham King
Basil Iwanyk
StarringBen Affleck
Jon Hamm
Rebecca Hall
Blake Lively
Jeremy Renner
Pete Postlethwaite
Chris Cooper
Narrated byBen Affleck
CinematographyRobert Elswit
Edited byDylan Tichenor
Music byHarry Gregson-Williams
David Buckley
Production
companies
Distributed byWarner Bros.
Release date
  • September 17, 2010 (2010-09-17)
Running time
125 minutes
CountryTemplate:Film US
LanguageEnglish
Budget$37 million[1]
Box office$154 million[2]

The Town is a 2010 crime film starring, co-written, and directed by Ben Affleck adapted from Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves.[3][4] The film opened in theaters in the United States on September 17, 2010, to positive reviews. In addition, the film opened at number one at the United States box office with more than $23 million. Jeremy Renner was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as James "Jem" Coughlin.

The film is one of a number set in Boston, Massachusetts, over the past decade that have formed a "sub-genre" of crime films, including Affleck's own 2007 film Gone Baby Gone.

Plot

Four lifelong friends from the dangerous streets of the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown—Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck), James "Jem" Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), Albert "Gloansy" Magloan (Slaine), and Desmond "Dez" Elden (Owen Burke)—rob a bank, taking bank manager, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall), hostage. After escaping capture, the gang releases Claire, who has seen a distinctive tattoo on one of the robbers. Doug later follows Claire and pretends to befriend her to get information from her about the investigation, but the two become involved and a relationship begins, unbeknownst to the gang, including Doug's best friend Jem, who bears the incriminating tattoo. Doug tells Claire of his search for his long-lost mother, and how he blew his chance to be a professional hockey player for a life of crime. When Claire tells him about her knowledge of the tattoo, Doug feigns concern for Claire's safety and convinces her not to tell police about it, while gradually becoming disenchanted with his criminal lifestyle.

FBI Special Agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm) surveils the gang, learning they work for local florist and crime lord Fergus "Fergie" Colm (Pete Postlethwaite), who has another robbery set up for the gang. During a visit to his father Stephen (Chris Cooper) who is serving time in prison, Doug reveals his plan to leave Charlestown and go to Florida. Stephen ends the visit by telling his son "I'll see you again, this side or the other". Doug reluctantly agrees to pull off the robbery in the North End of Boston, where gunfire erupts. The police give chase, and the gang barely escapes. Later, Frawley interrogates each of them, but fails to get a confession and is forced release them. When Claire quits her job, Frawley learns of her relationship with Doug and confronts her. Claire, who is shocked to learn that Doug is one of the men who kidnapped her, is suspected by Frawley of being an accomplice, but Claire eventually agrees to help him catch Doug.

Jem relays plans of another of Fergie's heists to Doug, who refuses, even though Jem had, in the past, killed a man who was going to kill Doug. After Fergie tells Doug he will kill Claire if he doesn't agree to the job, Doug relents, but threatens to kill Fergie if Claire is harmed. While preparing for the job, Jem tells Doug he is ready to shoot it out with police instead of going back to prison.

At Fenway Park, Doug and Jem enter dressed as Boston police officers, trick the guards, gain entrance into the money room, and steal several million dollars in cash. They prepare to leave in an ambulance dressed as paramedics, unaware that Agent Frawley has coerced Doug's ex-girlfriend Krista (Blake Lively) into revealing details of the heist by threatening to keep her from her daughter. Surrounded by police and caught in a firefight with SWAT, Dez and Gloansy are killed while Doug and Jem slip away in their police uniforms. Agent Frawley figures out the ruse and catches sight of Jem, who fires at Frawley, but is cornered by the police. Wounded, out of ammunition, and determined not to go back to prison, Jem rushes toward the police, and is immediately gunned down. Doug witnesses the killing of his best friend, but manages to evade capture.

Returning to Fergie's flower shop, Doug kills Fergie and his bodyguard, and calls Claire to ask her to come away with him to Florida. Watching from across the street, Doug sees the FBI are with Claire, who at first tells him to come pick her up, but eventually gives him a coded message to warn him away. Doug flees, donning a bus driver's uniform and escaping from Boston in a stolen bus and later by train, eventually making it to Florida. Later, Claire finds a bag buried by Doug in her community garden containing money, a tangerine, and a note from him telling her he has left town. Claire donates the money, in the name of Doug's mother, for refurbishment of a local ice-hockey arena that Doug, once a promising hockey player, had played in. The note ends with the words "I'll see you again, this side or the other."

Cast

  • Ben Affleck as Doug MacRay, a career criminal.
  • Jon Hamm as Special Agent Adam Frawley, an FBI agent pursuing the team of criminals.
  • Rebecca Hall as Claire Keesey, a bank manager who falls in love with Doug.
  • Jeremy Renner as James "Jem" Coughlin, Doug's best friend and a member of Doug's team.
  • Blake Lively as Krista Coughlin, Jem's sister and Doug's ex-girlfriend who has a 19-month-old daughter, Shyne.
  • Chris Cooper as Stephen MacRay, Doug's father.
  • Slaine as Albert "Gloansy" Magloan, a member of Doug's team.
  • Titus Welliver as Dino Ciampa, Adam Frawley's bank robbery task force partner.
  • Pete Postlethwaite as Fergus "Fergie" Colm, the Florist, the crime boss in the town.
  • Owen Burke as Desmond "Dez" Elden, a member of Doug's team, and a systems technician at a cable company called Vericom.

Production

The interior of a former MassBank branch in Melrose, Massachusetts, was used for the main robbery of the film.

The production began filming late August 2009 in Boston.[5][6] The former MASSBank branch located in Melrose, Massachusetts, was used as the location for the first robbery of the film, taking on the name Cambridge Merchants Bank[7] (the exterior shots, however, are of Cambridge Savings Bank in Harvard Square). Filming also took place at Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Connecticut, for casino scenes, Massachusetts Correctional Institution – Cedar Junction in Walpole, Massachusetts, for use of their visiting room, and Woburn, Massachusetts, own Anderson Regional Transportation Center for the ending Amtrak scenes.[citation needed]

Release

The Town was shown at the Venice Film Festival and premiered at Boston's Fenway Park. The film was released in the United States on September 17, 2010.

Box office

The film took first place at the box office during its opening weekend, taking in $23.8 million.[8] The Town grossed $92.1 million in the United States and Canada with an additional $61.8 million in other territories for a total of $154 million worldwide on a production budget of $37 million.[2][1]

Home media

The film was released on Blu-ray disc and DVD on December 17, 2010 (2010-12-17). Both versions include special features and commentary including a look at Affleck as a director and actor. The extended/unrated version is a Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy bundle which includes 28 minutes of additional footage, taking the runtime to over 153 minutes.[9]

Reception

Critical reviews

The Town has received critical acclaim. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 94% of 208 critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 7.7 out of 10. The site describes the film as "tense, smartly written, and wonderfully cast".[10] Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gives the film a score of 74 based on 42 reviews.[11]

Roger Ebert gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, praising Jeremy Renner's performance and Affleck's direction.[12] Several reviewers praised the film's action sequences. In his review for The New York Times, A. O. Scott commented on the opening heist, "That sequence, like most of the other action set pieces in the film, is lean, brutal and efficient, and evidence of Mr. Affleck’s skill and self-confidence as a director."[13] Brooks, in The Guardian, wrote that the action sequences were "sharply orchestrated" but added "it's a bogus, bull-headed enterprise all the same; a film that leaves no cliche untrampled."[14] Justin Chang wrote in Variety that the action scenes strike "an ideal balance between kineticism and clarity" aided by cinematographer Robert Elswit and film editor Dylan Tichenor.[15] Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film an A+, noting that he found the film incredibly similar to Michael Mann's Heat, which he described as "one of [his] favorite movies of all time."[16] The reviewers at Spill.com also praised one of the shootout scenes, saying "It is surely the best shootout scene we have seen in decades."[17] Writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Laremy Lengel titled his review "The Town Works Best if You Avoid the Heat," also referencing Mann's film.[18]

As a Boston-based crime drama, the film forms part of a "crime-movie subgenre" typically marked by "flavorsome accents, pungent atmosphere and fatalistic undertow," according to Chang. Within that subgenre, which includes The Boondock Saints, The Departed, Mystic River and Affleck's Gone Baby Gone, The Town is more of a straightforward crime-procedural and has a more optimistic outlook.[15]

Awards and nominations

Jon Hamm and Ben Affleck chat on the set in Cambridge, Massachusetts

The cast has been nominated for several awards from the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Cast and the National Board of Review.

Also, Jeremy Renner has received nominations for Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture, Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Pete Postlethwaite has posthumously been nominated for a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor. The film has also received several Satellite Award nominations for Renner, Affleck as director, film editing, adapted screenplay, and best motion picture drama.[19]

Charlestown, bank robbery and crime

A voice in the trailer of the film says: "There are over 300 bank robberies in Boston every year. Most of these professionals live in a 1-square-mile neighborhood called Charlestown." In fact, there were 23 reported bank robberies in the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the first quarter of 2010, compared with 49 in Illinois and 136 in California, according to the FBI.[20]

The film ends with a written disclaimer: "Charlestown's reputation as a breeding ground for armed robbers is authentic. However, this film all but ignores the great majority of the residents of Charlestown, past and present, who are the same good and true people found most anywhere."[21]

According to a September 2010 article in The Boston Globe, Charlestown was once known as an area where bank robbers were concentrated, but has not been since the mid-1990s, and the subject has been a sore point for "Townies". Now much of the neighborhood has been gentrified. There is some sense of rivalry between Townies, people who lived in the historically Irish-Catholic neighborhood for decades, and "Tunies", largely white-collar workers who arrived with gentrification, but most of that has died down, the newspaper reports.[20] [2]

In the early 1990s, a series of bank robberies and armored car robberies by Townies focused attention on Charlestown. In one heist in Hudson, New Hampshire, two guards were killed. (In one scene, where Agent Frawley is delivering a briefing on the robbers, he mentions that Doug's father is serving life for an armored car robbery in which he hijacked a bread truck up to New Hampshire, and executed both of them with their own weapons when one of them saw his face - which Frawley notes led to the passing of regulations stating that armored car drivers are not allowed to leave the cab even if their partner is being held at gunpoint.) Charles Hogan got the idea for his novel, on which the film is based, in 1995. "It was just so remarkable that this one very small community was the focus for bank robbers," he said, but he was very aware that crime was only one part of the community, and he did not want to make all residents of the neighborhood look like criminals.[22] At the film's premiere, Affleck made a similar statement: "Charlestown isn’t full of bank robbers and Dorchester isn’t full of bad guys and Southie isn’t full of math geniuses or bad people."[23]

Jack O'Callahan, a Charlestown native born in 1957, said there was an element of crime in Charlestown when he grew up there, "But it didn't bleed into the neighborhood. And those guys were pretty good parents who went to church on Sundays. They were gangsters, but they were good neighbors."[20]

References

  1. ^ a b Fritz, Ben (2010-09-16). "Movie projector: 'Easy A' expected to lead 'The Town,' 'Devil,' 'Alpha and Omega'". Los Angeles Times. Tribune Company. Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  2. ^ a b The Town (2010). Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2011-02-03.
  3. ^ Miller, Neil (2009-08-27). "Blake Lively Goes to 'Town' for Ben Affleck". Film School Rejects. Retrieved 2009-09-05.
  4. ^ Kit, Borys (2009-08-26). "Blake Lively going to 'Town' for WB, Legendary". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2009-09-16.
  5. ^ Gayle, Fee; Raposa, Laura (2009-09-01). "Ben Affleck, Blake Lively are the talk of 'The Town'". Boston Herald. Retrieved 2009-09-05.
  6. ^ PopSugar (2009-09-01). "Blake Gets a Baby Welcome to Ben's Town". PopSugar. Retrieved 2009-09-05.
  7. ^ DeMaina, Daniel (2009-10-09). "Melrose: 'Lights, cameras, action' in city as Ben Affleck movie shoots locally this month". Melrose Free Press. GateHouse Media. Retrieved 2009-10-10.
  8. ^ Staff (September 20, 2010). "'The Town' takes box office win with $23.8M". Google Search. Associated Press. Retrieved September 20, 2010.
  9. ^ "The Town (US - DVD R1". /Film. Retrieved November 26, 2010. {{cite news}}: Text "BD) in News" ignored (help)
  10. ^ "The Town Movie Reviews, Pictures". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
  11. ^ "The Town Reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved 2011-10-01.
  12. ^ Ebert, Roger (2010-09-15). "The Town Review". Chicago Sun-Times.
  13. ^ Scott, A.O. Bunker Hill to Fenway: A Crook’s Freedom Trail. New York Times (2010-09-16)
  14. ^ Brooks, Xan. The Town Film Review. The Guardian (2010-09-09). Retrieved 2010-09-18.
  15. ^ a b Chang, Justin. The Town Review. Variety (2010-09-09). Retrieved 2010-09-18.
  16. ^ Roeper, Richard (2010-09-26). "The Town Review". Chicago Sun-Times.
  17. ^ [1]
  18. ^ Lengel, Laremy. "The Town Works Best if You Avoid the Heat". Seattle Post Intelligencer, 2010-09-17.
  19. ^ Nominees for the 83rd Academy Awards. Oskars.org. Retrieved 2011-02-03.
  20. ^ a b c Baker, Billy, "Robbed of its new image? Charlestown hopes not Affleck’s new film is the talk of the Townies". The Boston Globe (2010-09-18). Retrieved 2010-09-18.
  21. ^ Review: The Town. NewCityFilm.com. Retrieved 2011-02-03
  22. ^ Woodman, Tenley, "Author Hogan talks about his kind of ‘Town’". Boston Herald (2010-09-16). Retrieved 2010-09-18
  23. ^ Fee, Gayle Fee & Raposa, Laura. "Stars go to ‘Town’ for premiere!", "Inside Track" (2010-09-15). Retrieved 2010-09-18.

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