Originally Posted By: Lovecraft
Originally Posted By: Lilo
The Town

Despite using virtually every known cliche of heist flicks/Irish gangster movies/action movies and running maybe 20 minutes longer than needed, "The Town" was a relatively entertaining film.

It was testament to Affleck's directing skills that this was so since not everyone is able to make a good movie out of a story that includes such obvious plot lines as "hot tempered second-in-command", "slutty girlfriend", "racist Irish", "One Last Job", "An offer you can't refuse", "Just like his father", "Four man band", "The good girl", "It's quiet out there-Yeah too quiet", "You were like a brother to me", "I'm not going back to prison" and so on.

The movie looks great (especially on HD) and really brings out the beauty of some portions of Boston. Still if you've seen "Heat" you've already seen "The Town". The only question would be did you like "Heat".


Loved this film, and your review was pretty good. However Heat and The Town are completely different movies, besides being heist films, and in no way does seeing one mean you've seen the other.


Ehh...
professional heist team led by a "good" thief of high intelligence who eschews violence where possible.
broad daylight shootouts.
betrayal by key trusted figures.
warning signals sent by compromised love interests.
lead character seeking vengeance.
One last job.
ominous non-violent confrontation between leaders of "bad guys" and "good guys".

I thought there were enough similarities to warrant a mention. smile It's not a shot at either Affleck or the audience. I enjoyed both Heat and The Town.

They are different, IMO Affleck makes "The Town" look a lot better than "Heat" while the second guy has much better motivation and is drawn more strongly but even Affleck recognizes that some comparisons were unavoidable.

The film with which The Town begs obvious comparison is Michael Mann's Heat, and it is a comparison Affleck initially hoped to avoid. "That movie's really the gold standard of heist films, and I knew that doing this movie it was going to come up. At first I thought I could duck a bit, get away from it somehow.

"Then I started interviewing a lot of guys who were in prison, and invariably I'd say during the course of the interview, well what kind of things inspired you and they'd all say, 'have you seen the movie Heat?' And then I thought, 'well maybe this is just limited to the crooks', but then I went in to see the FBI and the f***** poster for Heat was on the wall, and at that point I thought, 'well, I'm just going to have to live with this!'"

Affleck

"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives."
Winter is Coming

Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.