Some brief thoughts on the film that I've posted elsewhere:
A fast, post-Heat genre vehicle that substitutes the glossy sea-view apartments and wide highways common to this sort of thriller with a more downbeat, old neighbourhood feel (bank robbing is a 'profession' passed down through generations), with narrow one-way streets that hinder any getaway truck and community buildings long in need of grants and refurbishment. If it's heart is in the right place – one can see its intentions firmly written on its sleeve – it settles too often on old-fashioned motion-turning: even the 'moral ambiguity' of the cops and robbers dynamic has point-of-view on its side, and Affleck is too keen on playing the good-guy villain. Scenes between him and Rebecca Hall are driven by shorthand superficiality: personal past parental problems stand in for genuine character depth; John Hamm seems to be on board only to test his big-screen potential. That said, it's an often involving entry into the heist genre that handles its material with much commitment and not much pretension.
As it happens, I also watched Affleck's debut feature, Gone Baby Gone, two days after. My thoughts:
Adaptation of a novel by the same author as Mystic River, and, like that film, one that is ugly and mechanical, relying on a great deal of the viewer's discretion in overlooking some implausible plotting because the subject matter is so 'dark' and 'serious'. It seemingly doesn't matter that the characters and the relationships between them are all superficial in that way genre films apparently demand. Debut director Ben Affleck gains much from reliable brother Casey, but even committed efforts from both can't make something seamless out of a story whose concluding moral dilemma leaps out as the contrived core of an uninteresting Maguffin.
