Blue Collar Professionalism: A Review of ‘The Town’

Armoured car robberies. Divided loyalties. Love across social boundaries. A single-minded FBI agent. These are not elements which sound fresh, even if they do instantly push reliable buttons of escapist entertainment. If Michael Mann did not put a lid on the genre with Heat, then surely David Mamet did with Heist? The former expanded everything to an epic framework of isolationist emptiness, the latter honed in on the mechanics of the con and found them to be hollow too. But the heist film lives on, and is now tackled by Ben Affleck in his follow-up to his debut Gone Baby Gone. The Town is a disappointment, but it’s an immersive one.

Affleck casts himself in the lead role, a Charlestown, Boston native and professional bank robber. Not that professionalism is the focus of the film: the details in the robbery sequences (microwaving security tapes, bleaching away prints and fibres) are engrossing, but there are no meticulous scenes of planning and organisation. This is a day-job for Affleck’s Doug MacRay and his gang: they’re normal people, not single-minded automatons. This allows the film to ground itself in the everyday existence of the characters, their barbecues and casual social connections. Like the Boston neighbourhood of Gone, Baby, Gone, Charlestown is here a grim and hopeless place which nevertheless the residents take deep pride in (“like it was something they’d accomplished”).

This focus on a locality, as well as the criminal milieu and downbeat plotting, call to mind Antoine Fuqua’s recent Brooklyn’s Finest, and The Town suffers from many of the same problems. Fuqua is better at sloshing in the dark dramatic pulse of the seediness he depicts; Affleck’s skill is the perhaps more mature even-handed depiction of protagonists that would be turned into caricatures by a director with less understanding of his setting (Affleck grew up in a nearby neighbourhood). Such an approach harkens back to similar American thrillers of the 1970s, films like Cruising and The French Connection, in which criminal activity was endemic of social disenfranchisement.

For my money Affleck’s debut was better at revealing the tension between glossy narrative simplification (bound up with media saturation) on the one hand, and personal moral imperatives on the other. When, in The Town, a character who is being forced to betray a friend asserts “I’m a person”, it’s the cry of a character in a genre piece trying to be more than the mechanics of her role in the drama. This is a fascinating approach to the issue of realism and drama, and it bubbles away beneath the surface throughout (once again Affleck uses the CSI series as an abutment to his own methodology).

As a technical exercise, it is in the film’s final third that it most impresses. A robbery at a Boston landmark devolves into a gun battle which can stand amongst cinema’s best, even though there is the lingering suspicion that the pyrotechnics are undermining good work elsewhere. When Neil McCauley moves to kill a member of his gang who betrayed him in Heat it is an expression of his newfound personal freedom; when The Town begins moving in the same circles, it feels like lazy playing to the gallery.

As a consolidation piece (of Affleck's directorial skill, of Jeremy Renner's credentials as an angry young sociopath, of Boston's de facto positioning as recession era every-America) there is much to admire. Indeed, while it feels unremarkable for much of its running time, it has been two days since I visited The Town and I'm itching to go back, fearing I missed of neglected some of its subtler topography. This alone makes it the best splashy American crime offering for some time.

Running Up That Hill: A Review of 'Salt'

Why name a film Salt? And a Hollywood star vehicle blockbuster at that? This question concerned me before I saw the film, and it and many, many others echoed unanswered around my brain after it had finished. But only for about an hour, after which it is hard to remember much of anything about this contemporary espionage action thriller.

The pitch: Angelina Jolie plays CIA operative Evelyn Salt who is accused of being a Russian sleeper agent. Films have been predicated on less, it’s true, but Salt takes minimal set-up to new extremes. In a half-hearted attempt to compensate it scatters brief and unenlightening flashbacks throughout, which only serve to emphasize the shallowness of the exercise.

Within minutes our protagonist is on the run, and watching Jolie run is the true purpose of this film, even though she runs like an eight-year-old girl being egged on by a demanding father at sports day. Salt’s sprinting athleticism does not so much dominate the film as it is the film, her movements through diverse spaces in leaps and bounds operating in the same manner as hyperactive editing in a Tony Scott film, or costumes and masks in a superhero narrative: it is the principle organising schemata around which all else revolves (check out an athletic act of vengeance towards the end, or compare the depictions of her body in the opening and closing scenes). The model is overtly Bourne-esque, but where Damon flinched Jolie pouts, moving as she does into each encounter with the innate knowledge that the framing, choreography and wirework will all be on her side.

Charitable viewers might call the sensations of the first act ‘ambiguity’, although I prefer ‘rudderlessness’. The third and fourth reels appear to have been lost, and moments after her flight from the authorities Salt is embroiled in the assassination of a foreign leader that in any other film would be the finale (it is foreshadowed accordingly, in a manner inescapably similar to that parodied by Shane Black in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and which could be called ‘Power Plant Climax’ syndrome). Having got this out of the way, Salt then casts around aimlessly for more drama, and goes off the rails in the same manner that seasons of 24 were wont to do at about the eighth episode.

The central conceit of highly trained undercover Russians attempts to commingle anxieties of the cold war and contemporary fears of terrorist sleeper cells, but it’s hard not to think of the recently exposed real-life agents in America whose political and strategic irrelevance would have been far more intriguing a focus, and would seem to be a better fit for both this cast (with quiet character actors like Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor in supporting roles) and director Phillip Noyce, whose Jack Ryan thrillers Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger would laugh Salt out of the situation room.

Then there’s the racism, which somehow manages to be both outdated and bland while still offending – writer Kurt Wimmer seems unaware that the cold war ever ended, or even that the Soviet Union dissolved. One cannot go too far critiquing the film for its one-dimensional and broadly villainous Ruskies, as the presentation of the American Commander-in-Chief – played, appropriately, by an actor named Hunt Block, who I hope was cast for that reason alone – is stupefyingly basic. President Block’s utter lack of charisma, characterisation, or distinguishing features (even the aforementioned 24 has moved on from white male leaders) seems to codify within Salt a response to any critique of its anti-Russia sentiment.

With an America, and Americans, this boring, we almost cheer the ushanka-wearing vodka-swilling black-coat-wearing Kalashnikov-wielding bastards on for wanting to spice the place up with a little … seasoning.

Inter Action: The Expendability of Star Power

The action hero is dead. Tom Cruise may strut his stuff across the globe in Knight and Day, but he is little more than an animated corpse, marking time until a retirement that is closer, and more comprehensive, than ever before. The failure of the Tomster’s most recent vehicle has been well covered by the trade press (see, for example, JoBlo), and it is tempting to see it manifesting the beginning of the end of the star system as we know it.

Tempting, but perhaps not entirely accurate. Certainly, along with Angelina Jolie’s Salt, Knight and Day feels like the last gasp of this kind of front-heavy filmmaking, all star wattage, a credible but non-authorial director employed (Phillip Noyce and James Mangold respectively), and a plot which turns everything into an undeveloped McGuffin in order to better focus on the face and body of the star. Yet Salt’s box office figures were not unhealthy (roughly making back its budget in the US, as opposed to Knight and Day’s domestic loss of nearly $50 million), and poor ticket sales can easily be blamed on a combination of recession-hit consumers (and inflated cinema ticket prices) and the proliferation of free media (including pirated recent releases).

The summer of 2010 has also seen a concerted consolidation of an alternative: the ensemble action film. This is not a new genre, but it is certainly coming of age, and seems to be crowding individual star vehicles and buddy films out of multiplexes. The wannabe titan of the bunch was of course Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, which took much mileage (all of it, actually) from the action credentials of the cast. Unfortunately, the concept never quite made it off the drawing board, leaving the likes of Terry Crews and Randy Couture (who?) to fill out the special ops team, rather than the intended Wesley Snipes and Steven Segal (who somehow gain credibility by turning the job down). We are still left with Sly, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke. Arnie and Brucie have cameos. But there’s no excitement to this agglomeration, and it’s all a bit like a High School reunion – everyone pretends to have a good time, and they dance a little with each other, but at the end of the evening they’re all leaving wondering why they came at all and going home to their frumpy wives. We’ve all moved on.

Marginally more successful was The A-Team, which was polite enough to cast talented actors who could ape their televisual antecedents without overly humiliating themselves. Whenever they talked about their moral dilemmas, or their dreams, we winced; but the easy camaraderie of the group was more convincing than The Expendables, and was more successfully engineered into the plotting (what little of it there was). Better still was the blatant A-Team rip-off from earlier in the Summer, The Losers. Moving with a light touch not evident in the effects-heavy, noise-tastic splurge of Hannibal Smith’s plans coming together, The Losers was like a glass of cheap fruit squash: of no nutritional value and with a plastic taste, but just what you need on a hot day. “The bit when we were on fire was my favourite, but the shootout, man, that was good times,” says Chris Evans’ character Jensen towards the beginning. This is the action film as hanging out; movement as breezy weightless spectacle.

Both The A-Team and The Losers depict a team of American soldiers betrayed by the CIA on foreign soil, who then fight their way back to America and end up in the Port of Los Angeles (their term) to face down the villain. Their appeal is spending time with alpha males whose non-threatening easiness with each other can be read either as the re-emergence of the unapologetic macho identity, or a desperate scramble to convince us that such uber-masculinity is still vital in a world of metrosexuals and post-traumatic stress disorder. But both films consistently undermine their males, like John McClane’s blue-collar loser in Die Hard, and in this they vary radically from The Expendables, with its valorisation of muscular display and violent triumph at the expense of logic, coherence, or significance. For all its inference of unity, Stallone’s film is about male action in isolation.

Whether this move towards ensemble adventures will continue remains to be seen, although it is worth mentioning some forthcoming Marvel projects. Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh for some reason, has unknown Chris Hemsworth in the lead role, while The Avengers (due, exhaustively, in 2012) is designed around this group dynamic. Perhaps the assembly of a team is becoming the de facto expression of relaxed homosocial banter, while lone heroes are expected to suffer their loneliness as inaccessible martyrs, as in The Dark Knight. So, speaking of Christopher Nolan, let me end by pointing out that even a film as relentlessly subjective and isolationist as a thriller set inside dreams still relies upon squad-based plotting and humour (“don’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling”). For all the readings applied to Inception we might also add that it emplots the conflict between the successful and enjoyable experience of group enterprise with the ever-present spectre of personal secrecy and isolationism, and leaves us in limbo as to the victor of this ontological battle.