Town, the

Ben Affleck has been known as a child actor, Matt Damon's distant cousin and close friend (and co-winner of the 1997 Oscar for their Goodwill Hunting screenplay), a mediocre leading actor (Pearl Harbor, Daredevil), the elder brother of Casey Affleck, and the boyfriend of various lead actresses. Since 2005, when he got married (to Jennifer Garner), he's established better recognition as a Boston-focused writer-director, with Gone Baby Gone (2007) and now The Town (2010).

A mutual friend of him and Damon co-wrote the screenplay with Affleck, joined by a first-timer on the adaptation of a novel. It depicts a square-mile Boston district, Charlestown, as the world's record-setting home base for bank robbers. Within the city's Irish families, hold-ups are an ancestral business.

This is a world of cliches too. Motherless Doug (Affleck) has been raised by another family while his father (Chris Cooper) is in prison. His adopted brother is a violent ex-con (Jeremy Hurt Locker Renner chewing the Boston scenery well), and the proxy sister is a promiscuous addict who'd supposedly long been sensitive Doug's bed-mate. The young men's gang of robbers includes three other local lads and works on assignment for an Irish florist and heist idea man (Pete Postlethwaite).

The masked gang robs a bank, takes its female manager (Rebecca Hall) hostage temporarily, escapes, and decide to keep an eye on the woman - at which point, so early in the movie, the plot raises a movie-goer's eyebrows. They flutter angrily when Doug takes a big fancy to the woman, the feeling's reciprocated, and the psychotic ex-con catches them out in public. Meanwhile, inevitably, there's a local cop working alongside a determined FBI agent (Jon Mad Men Hamm), and the gang, abetted by the addict, has two more jobs to do for the florist.

The final heist, in the Red Sox stadium, is paced and edited well, but the loose ends are resolved with further incredibilities that defy logic (and moral justice). As a crime movie, The Town is a technically competent piece of work for which Affleck deserves credit. As a narrative and love story, though, it fails, and the DVD's unrated cut (148 minutes) clearly shows why and how it could lose 23 minutes in its cinema version. The extensive trim may explain why the movie gained high favourable ratings from critics. At its full length, it looks very over-rated.