The Town, which is directed by what the trailers call “the acclaimed director of Gone Baby Gone, is being hailed as the next The Departed. Although The Town has much in common with the Academy Award-winning Martin Scorsesee film, such as Boston accents, violent crime, and potentially ill-advised romances, the Ben Affleck directed flick opening this weekend is missing a couple key components that made The Departed a truly exceptional film: tension and emotional core. While The Town is a great movie, there is still that wish that it could have been better.

Read more after the jump!

The opening title cards alert the audience that one small area of Boston—Charlestown—is home to more bank robbers than all of the U.S. One such bank robber, Doug (Affleck) is then seen robbing a bank in Cambridge with his crew, which also consists of Jem (Jeremy Renner), who brazenly decides to take the bank manager, Claire, hostage (Rebecca Hall). After her release, a zealous FBI agent (Jon Hamm) tries to get to the bottom of the Charlestown crew, while Doug follows Claire around to make sure she didn’t see anything while being blindfolded and kidnapped and subsequently falls in love with her. Violence, robberies, and interrogations ensue. The plot is fairly basic with several secondary characters, such as Jem’s drug dealing sister and Doug’s part-time sex companion (Blake Lively), Doug’s incarcerated daddy (Chris Cooper), and the florist/crime lord of Charlestown (Pete Postlethwaite).

Where The Town succeeds is through its actors. While Affleck gives a meaty performance, it’s not quite his finest, but Renner is incredible as the loose cannon of the group. He is the only character that lends any sort of tension to the film. Hamm is good in his role, but perhaps it’s just nice to see Don Draper with a little bit of scruff. He’s not really given much to do but interrogate loudly. Cooper dazzles the screen in his all-too-brief scene. Although Lively is being complimented left and right for her drugged out performance, she seemed more like a pair of tits and a bad accent to me. Hall is decent enough but is given little to do.

Affleck also shines as a director here. The robbery sequences are tight and fast and the cinematography of Boston is vivid. He should definitely have a long directing career ahead of him.

However, where The Town falters in comparison to The Departed is in its emotional core. I didn’t feel invested in the relationship between Doug and Claire at all. I had no idea why she would even fall in love with this dude, and the romance was wholly unbelievable. Pretty much none of the relationships, save for Doug and Jem’s are even understandable much less fleshed out, so it’s hard to completely buy any weight or tension of the film. Sure, you want Doug to get out of his crime life and start anew, but you don’t necessarily yearn for it the same way as you did for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Departed.

Although the script could have been tighter and the emotional center is lacking, The Town has incredible performances by Affleck, Renner, and Cooper (and even Fenway Park) and is worth checking out—if you don’t mind a few of these: “Haaaaahhhhhhhhvaaaaaaard.”

--Darcie Duttweiler