The Town
B-
The Town is like drawing a lion without the mane. It’s a nice little image of a pretty housecat, but it could have been the jungle’s king! In other words, The Town is not bad movie. On its own it could be an vaguely-stirring, thoroughly-entertaining, piece of work. However the problem is that its source material is so incredibly sophisticated and powerful, and The Town is so…not.
The basic idea of the story is fairly the same between book and movie—a conflicted bank robber named Doug starts up a romance with a victim of one of his crimes. The cast is impressive—Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) as the love interest, Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) as Doug’s aggressive friend and partner-in-crime, British star Pete Postelwaithe (When Saturday Comes) as the manipulative kingpin Doug works for, Blake Lively (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) as the drug-addicted hardcore-street kid obsessed with Doug, Chris Cooper (Adaptation) as Doug’s convict father, and Jon Hamm (Stolen, TV’s Mad Men) as the abrasive detective trying to take Doug down. All are great, especially Renner who is fortunate to have an excellent role to match his talents and Cooper who shines in despite next-to-nothing in screen time; however Affleck deserves as much recognition for his direction. He combines the stirring performances he arises with cunning camera moves and a heart-pounding, intense, deeply-engrossing pace to make the film as entertaining as possible. Sadly his writing skills (at least when working with Aaron Stockard and Blood Father-author Peter Craig) are not quite as compelling.
The real tragedy is that Chuck Hogan’s story (called The Prince of Thieves) was so good. Hogan (who also wrote The Standoff and co-wrote The Strain) combines his excellent writing with a riveting, well-woven plot filled with metaphors, compelling characters, and powerful moments. The movie ignores critical elements of the book like Doug’s struggle with alcoholism, Doug’s foolish reliance on others, and the ending. Wait, what’s that last one? Yup, the ending. Affleck and company didn’t just change the ending, they cut off the last four chapters of the book and substituted Fast and Furious mixed with The Punisher. The result is that about 60% of the morals Hogan wrote are completely ignored. Fortunately Hogan had a lot of good themes in his book so the film is not a total failure—but the fact that it is anything but perfect is terrible in and of itself.
The reasons for the changes were probably to quicken the movie along and to make it more accessible for an audience. This is actually vaguely insulting considering the book made sense and the studio takes the audience for a bunch of morons. Its not just the equivalent of Romeo resurrecting Juliet’s body—it also spends the time to switch lines like “would not a rose” to “I don’t give a $%^& if she’s a Capulet have you seen her butt!?!”
The Prince of Thieves is an excellent, powerful story. The Town is a mediocre action flick with a little extra. Not that I have anything against mediocre action flicks with a little extra; its just that a lot of effort must have gone into taking away all the “special” in the story.
