Some actors are just as good behind the camera as they are in front of it, and sometimes the results are particularly impressive when they simply take on both roles. If the vision is a particularly personal onewhich is conveyed by the same person as both actor and director.
Such a vision can be found in a melancholic and dirty way in Ben Affleck’s 2010 milieu study The Town, which you can currently stream on Netflix. The film has a lot to do: It wants to be a successful adaptation of a novel, a hard thriller, a gangster drama and an ambivalent declaration of love for Affleck’s childhood city of Boston. The nice thing is that the film manages to do just that.
This is what Ben Affleck’s gangster drama The Town is about
Doug MacRay (Affleck) sees himself as the unofficial ruler of Boston. Or at least as the important right-hand man of the biggest boss in the underworld. Doug is Leader of a very successful gang of bank robbers and has built himself a fairly comfortable life with his comrades. His closest but easily irritable friend is Jem (Jeremy Renner), who would bet his life for Doug.
So far, the criminals have always emerged from their robberies unscathed and have made a fortune. But one day, something goes wrong and suddenly the men are forced to to take a hostage: Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall). Fortunately, no blood is shed. But then the robbers discover that their ex-hostage lives dangerously close to their neighborhood.
During his research into Claire, the unforgivable happens to Doug: He falls in love with herSuddenly he finds himself caught between two stools and has to ask himself what kind of future he really wants. On top of that, the FBI is getting closer and closer to tracking down the bank robbers.
The Town on Netflix is a wonderfully hard mix of heist thriller and gangster drama
The Town is not Affleck’s directorial debut. That honor went to Gone Baby Gone. Every now and then The Town seems to disappear into obscurity like an unknown little brother and be forgotten. All the more reason to dig it up again regularly and make it clear: Affleck is making something out of the book Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan. absolutely worth seeing.
He staged stylishly and with a pleasant sense of balance between breathless tension and melancholic calm. Added to this is the acting in the film, which he directs, which constantly oscillates between emotional and cruelly harsh. Characters like powder kegs, driven and cold investigators, two hearts in one chest of a protagonist who was once so self-confident.
There is neither glorification nor hasty condemnation here; moments remain as they should. The action hurts as much as it needs toAnd we have a choice: we can empathize and share in the suffering, or simply enjoy the tension of a complex game of cat and mouse with cleverly placed violent moments.
Ben Affleck’s versatile gangster thriller The Town is now available to stream on Netflix.