Most heist movies treat the crew like pieces on a board. This one actually cares who they are.
Ben Affleck plays Doug, a Charlestown bank robber looking for a way out. The film proves he’s good at the job before it asks you to care about him. That opening heist is so clean that even the FBI agent chasing them can’t hide his respect for the work. Once you see how sharp these guys are, watching it fall apart hits harder.
Jeremy Renner takes the whole movie as Jem. Twitchy, furious, always one bad second from pulling a trigger. But he’s more than a loose cannon. He and Doug came up in the same foster home, and that one fact explains why Doug can’t cut him loose, even knowing Jem is the reason he’ll never get free.
Jon Hamm is excellent as the agent on their trail, smart and maybe a little impressed by the men he’s hunting. Every exchange between him and Doug has teeth because both of them are good at what they do.
Affleck directs without showing off. The camera stays close, Boston looks gray and lived-in, and the accents sound like people talking rather than actors doing impressions. The heists are shot so you can actually follow the geography, which is rarer than it should be.
The romance with Rebecca Hall is the soft spot. It functions, and she’s good, but it never kills the tension that’s humming through everything else.
This is a tense, quietly sad, thoroughly grounded crime film where the stakes are loyalty instead of loot.
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