Town, The

Aroview: Competent, briskly executed heist drama from actor/dir. Ben Affleck follows an armed robbery crew out of Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood, and the witness who unwittingly enters into a romance with the gang’s conflicted leader.

Robust performances (especially from Jeremy Renner as a ‘loose cannon’) and exciting action sequences aside, this hardly breaks new ground as far as heist movies and studies of criminal sociopathy go, and at best sits comfortably behind HEAT, through which the genre arguably reached its apex. Fans of GONE BABY GONE and its blue-collar milieu should certainly subscribe though; if not for the thick Boston accents and dodgy, good-for-nothing locals, then for Affleck’s assured and dependably measured direction, which serves up requisite thrills without ever getting ahead of itself.