The Town

Ben Affleck’s 2010 film follows a robbery crew working out of Charlestown in Boston; the director also plays the lead. It adapts Chuck Hogan’s novel Prince of Thieves. The opening title card declares Charlestown the country’s densest source of bank and armoured car robbers, but the figures do not support it: an FBI spokesman in Boston put all of Massachusetts under three percent of bank robberies nationally, and Boston police said Charlestown holds barely two percent of robberies in the city. Residents place that era in the eighties and early nineties. The film closes on a note conceding it ignored most Charlestown people. Jeremy Renner was nominated for supporting actor and lost to Christian Bale in The Fighter, the film’s only nomination. The Fenway Park robbery was staged in the real ballpark. The Boston Bruins will not license apparel to productions with swearing and violence, so the costume department made a fake logo. Rebecca Hall learned the accent from a recording of a Marblehead woman reading her lines. The Ultimate Collector’s Edition extended cut carries a darker ending that changes Doug’s fate. A good fit if each job built around its own disguise, from the nun costumes to Fenway, is what you read as the film’s rhythm. Not for anyone who will take the opening title card as fact.