The Town (2010 film)

Four lifelong friends from the neighborhood of Charlestown, Boston, Douglas "Doug" MacRay, James "Jem" Coughlin, Albert "Gloansy" MacGloan, and Desmond "Dez" Elden, rob a bank. Against the wishes of Doug, Jem takes bank manager Claire Keesey hostage, later releasing her unharmed.

Finding out Claire lives in their neighborhood, Doug follows her to find out how much she has told the police, and to ensure that hot-headed Jem does not eliminate her as a witness. Soon a romance grows between them, which Doug hides from the gang.

As the two grow closer, he tells Claire of his search for his long-lost mother, who he believes went to live with his aunt in Tangerine, Florida. He also almost became a professional ice hockey player before throwing it away to follow in his father's footsteps as a bank robber. Claire tells Doug she saw a tattoo on one of the robbers, but did not tell the FBI, and he realizes that she can identify Jem, sending them all to prison.

Jem will kill her if he knows, so to dissuade her, Doug tells her if she tells the police they will then put her in witness protection and send her to live in another state. His plan works, and she doesn't talk.

FBI Agent Adam Frawley recognizes their ties to local Irish mobster Fergus "Fergie" Colm, whose front is a florist's. During a visit to his father Stephen in prison, Doug shares his plan to leave Boston for Florida. Their next job, an armored car robbery in the North End, goes awry, and they barely escape. Frawley interrogates them, but fails to get confessions and must release them.

Doug asks Claire to go away with him, and she accepts. When Frawley learns Claire quit her job, he taps her phone, shows his file on Doug to her, and threatens to prosecute her as an accomplice after realizing they are together. Shocked to discover Doug was one of her assailants, she cooperates with the FBI and breaks up with him. He tries to back out of the next heist at Fenway Park; angered, Jem beats him, saying he is in too deep to walk away. Then, Fergie threatens to kill Claire if Doug does not do the job, telling him he controlled his father by making his mother an addict, which led to her suicide. Doug reluctantly agrees but swears that he will kill Fergie if anything happens to Claire.

At Fenway, Doug and Jem enter disguised as Boston police officers, steal $3,500,000 in gate cash, and prepare to escape in an ambulance, dressed as paramedics. The FBI, having received information from Doug's ex-girlfriend and Jem's single-mom sister Krista (whom Frawley had threatened), surrounds the perimeter. Caught in a firefight with FBI SWAT operators, Dez and Gloansy are both shot and killed. Frawley spots Jem and they exchange gunfire, in which Jem is wounded in the leg. Determined not to go back to prison and out of bullets, Jem commits suicide by cop by running out with guns in hand.

Knowing that Claire is in danger and that he will never escape as long as Fergie is alive, Doug murders him and his bodyguard and calls Claire. Watching from across the street via binoculars, he sees the FBI are with her as she tells him to come over. At first, he thinks she means to betray him, but she gives a clue verbally, to warn him away. Doug flees, donning an MBTA uniform and escaping on a train. Frawley deduces that Claire tipped him off, but her tip is too cryptic to provide grounds for an arrest.

Later, while gardening, Claire finds a buried bag containing money, a tangerine, and a note from Doug, suggesting that she can make better use of the money than he can and that they might see each other again. Claire donates the money, in memory of Doug's mother, to refurbish the local ice hockey arena where Doug once played. From the deck of a small house, Doug looks out over the water, forlorn, but seemingly safe in Florida.

• Ben Affleck as Douglas "Doug" MacRay
• Rebecca Hall as Claire Keesey
• Jon Hamm as FBI Special Agent Adam Frawley
• Jeremy Renner as James "Jem" Coughlin
• Blake Lively as Krista "Kris" Coughlin
• Chris Cooper as Stephen "Big Mac" MacRay
• Pete Postlethwaite as Fergus "Fergie" Colm
• Slaine as Albert "Gloansy" MacGloan
• Owen Burke as Desmond "Dez" Elden
• Titus Welliver as Detective Dino Ciampa
• Dennis McLaughlin as Russell "Rusty"
• Brian Scannell as Henry
• Isaac Bordoy as Alex Colazzo
• Jack Neary as Arnold Washton
• Edward O'Keefe as Morton Previt
• Victor Garber as David
• Jim Ford as FBI Swat (uncredited)

The Town was shown at the Venice Film Festival and premiered at Boston's Fenway Park. The film was released in the United States on September 17, 2010.

A voice in the trailer of the film says: "There are over 300 bank robberies in Boston every year. Most of these professionals live in a 1-square-mile neighborhood called Charlestown." In fact, there were 23 reported bank robberies in the entire state of Massachusetts in the first quarter of 2010, compared with 49 in Illinois and 136 in California, according to the FBI.[34]

The film ends with a written disclaimer: "Charlestown's reputation as a breeding ground for armed robbers is authentic. However, this film all but ignores the great majority of the residents of Charlestown, past and present, who are the same good and true people found most anywhere,"[35] to whom the film is dedicated.

According to a September 2010 article in The Boston Globe, Charlestown was once known as an area where bank robbers were concentrated, but has not been since the mid-1990s, and the subject has been a sore point for "Townies". Now much of the neighborhood has been gentrified. The paper reported there is some sense of rivalry between Townies, people who lived in the historically Irish-Catholic neighborhood for decades, and "Toonies", largely white-collar workers who arrived with gentrification, but most of that has died down.[34][36] The film makes reference to the definition of "Toonies" during one of Doug and Claire's dates.

In the early 1990s, an increase in the number of bank and armored car robberies by Townies focused attention on Charlestown. In one heist in Hudson, New Hampshire, two guards were killed, and is alluded to in the film - during a scene where Agent Frawley is briefing his task force, he mentions that Doug's father is serving life for a notorious robbery in Nashua. According to Frawley, the elder MacRay hijacked a "bread truck" (armored car) up to New Hampshire, and when one of the guards saw his face, he executed both of them with their own weapons. Frawley notes that this incident led to the passing of regulations prohibiting the driver from leaving the cab even if his partner is being held at gunpoint. Charles Hogan got the idea for his novel, on which the film is based, in 1995. "It was just so remarkable that this one very small community was the focus for bank robbers," he said, but he was very aware that crime was only one part of the community, and he did not want to make all residents of the neighborhood look like criminals.[37]

• Heist film
• Hood film

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