Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) and his crew pull off another successful bank heist.  However, during this job Doug’s brother, James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), decides to take a hostage just in case, the bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall).  After the crew figures out that the manager lives in their neighbourhood Doug tries to get close to her to see if she’s cooperating with the FBI and actually knows anything that’s worth cooperating over.  Soon enough Doug begins to have feelings for Claire and has to try and balance the fine line between the life he wants and the life he already has to try and keep everyone safe.

The movie knows what it is, a cat and mouse game between Doug and FBI S. A. Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm).  What makes it differ from many other of these kinds of movies is that it’s given our lead character, Doug, something to think about other than how much money he’ll be making with the next job.

The film tries to reach that level of real that films like Heat did, however it fails to hit the mark for a few reasons.  Ben Affleck’s character isn’t anywhere near as awesome as the character that De Niro played in Heat, and the same goes for the comparison between Jon Hamm and Pacino.  Both gave us thieves with not much to lose, but quickly the film gave them something that made their life meaningful and therefore made them want to admit that this was going to be the last job.  The problem with that is that they’ve embedded themselves in this world that isn’t that easy to walk away from.  So eventually they had to make a decision between the life and this one thing that makes that life worth living.  Both films take that point slightly differently, but I have to say that Mann’s version just felt better to me.

I particularly enjoy it whenever I’m watching these kinds of films and it gives us smart police.  However, in the case of this film I felt like the movie was smart but the character was not that brilliant.  It isn’t the fault of the character, acting or the writing, it’s just that I felt like we didn’t get to interact with Hamm enough to get how he came to all his conclusions.  It’s almost as if the film meant for me to just accept that Hamm is street savvy enough that everything we saw about the crew he would’ve found out and so at the end of the film when he’s right up against Doug and his guys we’re okay with it.  I think this is more a hindsight in Affleck’s directing that anything else.

With that said Affleck is definitely growing as a filmmaker.  With his first directed film, Gone Baby Gone, he blew us away with a sense of community and the guy who knows all the wrong people for all the right reasons.  Well in this film we’re talking about a community with a character who is the wrong person and finds a reason to try not to be.  It’s a nice shift in focus and I can’t wait to see how he shifts it with his next film.

IMDB says 8.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 94%

I say 7.5/10