Expectations were high going into this film, i am the perfect audience for this film. i love a good hard gritty urban crime drama. I'm sorry to say that i was a little disappointed, admittedly this could be due to me and my expectations rather than it being that bad a film because a bad film it is not.
Ben Affleck plays Doug Macray, a Boston bank robber, who suddenly finds a heart and falls in love with a girl who works in a bank that he robbed. it just felt a little too character development by numbers - bad guy, sees a girl, falls in love, wants to go straight. there isn't at any point any real reason that i can see for him to be totally changing his livelihood and going against everything he knows, his friends and his family, but that is exactly what he does. i did however find myself rooting for Ben Afflecks character, whether this is a testament to his acting charisma or the script i am unsure. he does indeed pull off a strong performance, he is obviously taken note of the Team America song and gone and got himself some acting lessons, even more credit to him to have taken the helm as director and writer also.
Other characters again seem stock people in Dougs life, Jeremy Renners character James Coughlin is an example - again a strong performance, but he plays the obvious crazy unhinged friend, and we are never given an insight to how and why. Mention here for Pete Postlethwaites part as a crime boss florist (??) with a very strange irish accent. theses characters makes the film seem like it has been under a number of re-writes and drafts, seemingly part of a much longer script which had much more complex characters, but in getting a running time down they have been shorn of their development.
a good film though with a solid, if a little empty, story. i just wich there had been more guns and shoot outs with the police.
3 stars
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