For the last few days, we’ve had the restless itch to watch a good Hollywood movie.

Voila, our wish was granted this afternoon with The Town.

Featuring Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner and Rebecca Hall, The Town is a lovely tension-filled crime thriller set in Boston.

A crime thriller set in Boston? Aha, reminds you schmucks of Martin Scorsese’s 2006 film The Departed, doesn’t it?

While the setting and the broad crime theme are the same, The Town and The Departed are indeed two different movies.

Departed was about the Irish mob and its infiltration into the ranks of the police while The Town is about a bunch of bank robbers who’ve been hitting local banks in Charlestown, a Boston suburb.

Doug MacRay, played by Ben Affleck, is the lynch pin of the robbers gang. When the bank alarm is tripped during their hit on a bank, they take the pretty bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) with them as hostage. Nice move, eh. There you have the perfect opportunity for a romantic angle.

Indeed! 😉

And where you have the bank robbers, you’ve got to have the hard-driving FBI agents on their trail, right.

So we have FBI agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm) and his team going around beating up people in their hunt for the perpetrators and finally, in desperation, planting fingerprint evidence to get the gang in for questioning. Does it work?

As befitting a good action movie, the movie proceeds at a very brisk clip and the bank robbery scenes and the getaways are neatly executed.

With equal finesse is handled the tense (for the audience) romantic relationship between the unsuspecting Claire and Doug, even as the FBI is maintaining a close watch on all of them and starting to tighten the noose.

If The Town were just an action film, it would not hold our interest so much.

But this one has plenty of drama given the heady cocktail of crime, sex, violence, betrayal, cops, fast chases and, of course, love thrown into the cauldron.

Adding to the tension, there’s also the desperate attempt by one of the members to leave the gang and the threats used to rein him in.

Good Actress
Rebecca Hall is a fine actress and we are glad to see her again.

As the wise souls of SearchIndia.com wrote at the beginning of this year after watching the British actress in The Prestige:

Scarlett Johansson was fine but we were more impressed with Rebecca Hall, Michael Caine and David Bowie, who play their parts notably.

We have no complaints with Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner (the guy played a bomb-defusing specialist in the Oscar winner Hurt Locker last year) et al. Renner is a solid actor and, perhaps because of his small stature, reminds us of another superb Hollywood star, i.e. Ed Norton.

By the way, if we haven’t told you already, Ben Affleck is also the director of this must watch film and co-author of the screenplay.

The Town proves yet again that with a solid plot, a tight screenplay and a talented bunch of actors, you can make a fine movie set in a Boston suburb or even Timbuktu. Will someone please tell that to the stupid c*nts in Bollywood and Kollywood who keep jetting off to Iceland, Norway, Brazil, Peru, Namibia, Mexico et al to film their crappy movies.

SearchIndia.com has no hesitation in recommending The Town to all ye schmucks. The movie has released across the U.S. and surely should be playing in a theater near you.

  Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner