Identity crisis

Astonishingly, I enjoyed The Town even though it is a heist movie with set-piece shoot-outs and car chases and even though it doesn’t break any new ground, which is just such a faff anyhow.

Astonishingly, I enjoyed The Town even though it is a heist movie with set-piece shoot-outs and car chases and even though it doesn’t break any new ground, which is just such a faff anyhow. Have you ever tried breaking new ground? It’s exhausting plus, after a certain age, it is very hard on the knees. So this isn’t fresh, exactly, but it is tense and exciting and well performed and you do end up caring about the people you’ve been manipulated into caring about. I ask you: what more could you want from a trip to the cinema? Unless, of course, it is something that makes you think, but that, too, is vastly overrated. And a faff.

It’s directed by Ben Affleck, who also stars and co-wrote the script. (Where do these people find the energy?) Affleck plays Doug MacRay, who lives in ‘The Town’, which is Charlestown, a poor, Irish-American, working-class neighbourhood just outside Boston, which, the film tells us, produces more bank robbers per capita than anywhere else in the world. Doug is a bank robber, just as his father was before him, and he is tattooed and a hoodlum and all that, but he is also smart, reflective and extremely buff. Has Affleck always been this buff? I’d certainly do him, and bugger the knees. I could worry about those later. I might even brush my hair. Anyhow, Doug wants out from the criminal world, wants to break the cycle, but he has his work cut out. He is part of a gang whose members are lifelong friends and are, in a way, his family.