Affleck plays Doug MacRay, a resident of the infamous Charlestown neighborhood of Boston who plans heists in his free time and occasionally takes a day off to pile into a car with his three friends and methodically clean out a bank or an armored car. One of his friends is James "Jem" Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), who did nine years in prison for shooting a guy at the age of 18 and is now a bit more brutal than the rest of the gang would prefer. So naturally, when Jem wants to track down a young, pretty bank manager (Rebecca Hall) who lives in Charlestown and may have seen too much at their last job, Doug offers to do it instead, and naturally falls in love with her. The speed with which Claire opens up to Doug, whom she hardly knows, is suspect, especially since she recently experienced a traumatic event, but I'm no psychiatrist, and will chalk it up to loneliness -- she doesn't have the accent to be from the neighborhood, and we never meet her friends or family. Her desire to travel and see the world inspires Doug to want to get out of town, too, since his memories mostly involve his mother leaving when he was six and his father getting a life sentence for murder not long after that. Happy!

Unfortunately, there are a lot of things keeping Doug there. Having been taken in by Jem's family when his dad went away, Doug is on-again-off-again with Jem's unbelievably trashy sister (Blake Lively), and Jem would rather he stuck around. Ditto the local florist (Pete Postlethwaite) who bankrolls their jobs and gets his cut. Also on his tail are FBI Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm), who's investigating the string of robberies, and a local cop (Titus Welliver) who knows everyone in the neighborhood and assists Frawley's investigation. (Also I keep expecting him to have an Irish accent, like he does on Sons of Anarchy.) Doug also visits his father (Chris Cooper) in prison, but he could care less what Doug did, which Doug implies was par for the course in his childhood, even when his mom walked out.

The movie has its moments of brutal violence that will remind you of Heat or The Departed, not to mention one twisty chase sequence through the streets of Boston. But Doug is also jokey and charming in his date scenes with Claire, which could have come right out of Good Will Hunting, and they take a lot of the pressure off in between heists. His deception with Claire is mostly played for chuckles, and one scene, in which he and Jem track down and get revenge on a couple of guys who were harassing Claire in the street, will make you laugh outright -- until Jem takes it over the top, as he usually does. Hamm displays a dry sense of humor as Frawley, and has a couple of funny lines himself, as well as a great, bad-cop monologue he gives in the interrogation room. And, of course, there are all those Boston accents. If you're from Boston, they may not be that funny, but for the rest of us, they're comedy gold.

Did you see The Town? Let us know what you thought below, then see why Boston has such a bad name!

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