“The Killer Inside Me”

When Anadarko, OK-born pulp fiction writer Jim Thompson’s fourth novel hit the revolving paperback book racks of 1952′s drugstores, supermarkets and bus stations, it sold for 25 cents a copy. You couldn’t find “The Killer Inside Me” in respectable establishments where hardbound best-sellers and highly regarded literary works were sold. The mainstream reading public just wasn’t ready for a story told from the point of view of a soft-spoken, small-town deputy sheriff whose long-repressed sadistic and homicidal urges are suddenly unleashed by a defiant, sadomasochistic prostitute.

The book has since grown from underground classic to a recognized seminal masterwork of noir fiction along with many of Thompson’s other novels, although the author never enjoyed such accolades in his lifetime. Several of his books have been adapted to film, some more successfully than others  (James Foley’s “After Dark, My Sweet” and Stephen Frears’ “The Grifters,” both released in 1990, hewed closest to Thompson’s bleak vision), but none have nailed the heart of the author’s darkness more effectively than this effort by director Michael Winterbottom (“A Mighty Heart”) and screenwriter John Curran (director of “The Painted Veil,” “Stone”).

With twilit Oklahoma locations standing in for 1950s West Texas, Casey Affleck’s coolly unnerving portrayal of a deceptively pleasant country gentleman harboring monstrous, pent-up lusts, and Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba both playing brilliantly against type — the former as a longtime, love-desperate girlfriend and the latter as a fiercely independent bad girl with appetites to match the deputy’s — Winterbottom creates a love-triangle-from-hell scenario that bravely plumbs the darkest recesses of the human soul and is as heartbreakingly tragic and strangely touching as it is brutally shocking.

But most of today’s mainstream moviegoers still aren’t ready for Thompson’s style of startling and disturbingly truthful storytelling, due mainly to the film’s graphic depiction of furious physical violence, which garnered negative reviews and poor box office that were sorely undeserved. Maybe someday this superbly crafted and acted film will gain the same measure of cult appreciation that Thompson’s haunting book finally achieved.

— Gene Triplett

Jack Rebney

As old media and new media mingle and morph, as the Internet invades every corner of our lives and as reality TV piques our basest collective curiosity, films like “Winnebago Man” inevitably find their way out of the underground shadows and into the mainstream.

What started as a quirky cult novelty in 1988 – as outtakes from a Winnebago promotional video in nuclear meltdown circulated on VHS tapes and eventually went viral on the Internet via YouTube – became the inspiration for filmmaker Ben Steinbauer to noodle around in search of the man who set the whole thing off.

That would be the dapper, middle-aged RV salesman Jack Rebney, who on a steamy, fly-flecked Iowa day in 1988 set out to film a Winnebago infomercial and, in outtakes between a series of foul-ups and flubbed lines, let fly with florid outbursts of anger, abuse and profanity that amount to minor blue masterpieces of inventive invective.

Bootleg clips of Rebney’s rants – apparently circulated by crew members he berated – eventually turned him without his knowledge into an Internet sensation, an underground celebrity dubbed “The Angriest Man in the World,” even though the man himself seemed blithely unaware of his dubious fame as he eventually retired to a remote mountaintop caretaker job in northern California.

And there, his hermit-like existence all these years later is interrupted by the curious Steinbauer, a film instructor at the University of Texas, Austin, who decided upon viewing the YouTube hit to track down Rebney and see how his questionable fame has affected his life.

Much of the documentary (with sharp camera work by former Oklahoma City filmmaker Bradley Beesley) charts Steinbauer’s initially frustrated quest, with private eyes coming up empty and dead ends leading to doubts that the elusive Rebney even exits. But eventually the two men meet, and that’s when “Winnebago Man” becomes most interesting and insightful.

At first, Rebney, 76, comes off as a charming, curmudgeonly hermit with failing eyesight who is only vaguely aware of his celebrity and doesn’t give a hoot. But as the persistent, media-savvy Steinbauer coaxes and prods his subject to open up, we gradually begin to see the more complex dimensions of Rebney and come to the realization that he hasn’t mellowed at all.

He’s still prone to angry outbursts. He’s still misanthropic and scornful of his fellow man. He speaks with old-world formality (peppered with plenty of f-bombs) and considers himself a dedicated Luddite at odds with the trivialities of pop culture and modern politics.

Through several quizzical and occasionally abusive sessions with Rebney, Steinbauer gradually manages to ferret out some surprising dimensions to the man’s character (he was once a TV newsman and a soft touch for friends in need). And the film takes a decidedly poignant turn as the young filmmaker and the old coot travel to a “found footage” film festival in San Francisco where Rebney surprisingly finds himself connecting with youthful pop-culture fans who love his vinegary outbursts and identify strongly with his articulate anger.

“Winnebago Man” travels a long and rambling road to find its thematic point (something about the power of online culture to illuminate as well as humiliate, perhaps? To examine as well as exploit, maybe?). But whatever the film’s point, it’s a hoot to hang out with such an irascible, opinionated, cunning individual as Jack Rebney and to watch how he slyly turns unintended and unwanted media fame to his own advantage.

- Dennis King

“Winnebago Man”

Not rated
1:25
3 stars
(Strong pervasive language)

Listed on wimgo Movies under Comedy

This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Pig Hunt”

Like “Deliverance” but without the banjos and the literary pedigree, “Pig Hunt” (due out on DVD Tuesday) charts a testosterone-fueled trek into hillbilly country that’s complicated by pot-growing sirens, a mysterious hippie and a killer, 3,000-pound black boar.

Wearing its low-budget B-movie pedigree with pride, this hybrid action-horror flick sports an above-average cast headed by Travis Aaron Wade, Tina Huang and Trevor Bullock, with musical support and a funny cameo as a backwoods preacher by Primus bassist Les Claypool.

The tale charts a trip by a group of San Francisco buddies to a remote norther California ranch to hunt wild pigs. As the hunters trudge deeper into the woods, their idyll is interrupted by encounters with the violent and unpredictable Tibbs Brothers, a machete-toting hippie stranger, vengeful rednecks and throat-slitting Cult Girls who grow dope by day and worship a giant killer pig by night. Naturally, the climax of the hunters’ trek is a showdown with that monstrous pig, The Ripper, a murderous porker with a taste for human bacon.

“Pig Hunt” is rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, drug content, sexuality, nudity and language. It runs 100 minutes and is being released by Phase 4 Films.

- Dennis King

Michael Douglas and Shia LeBeouf

At the clever opening of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” a stubble-faced Gordon Gekko is being released from eight years in the clink for the sharp double-dealing and insider trading he engineered in Oliver Stone’s original, epochal 1987 film.

As Gekko picks up his belongings — a blingy watch and ring, a gold money clip sans cash and a cellular phone the size of a hoagie — he seems a humbled man, yet with a wolfish glint still in his eye. A stretch limo pulls up to the prison gates, but it’s there to pick up a newly paroled rapper. Gekko is left to hop a seedy cab back into Manhattan.

And there he quickly learns that, in keeping with his mantra of the first film, greed is still rampant, if not good.

Much in the world of finance has changed since the suave, mercurial Gekko (Michael Douglas, reprising his Oscar-winning role) met his downfall, and his reappearance couldn’t be timelier. Out on the street again, he pens a doomsday book, titled “Is Greed Good?,” preaching against the evils of Wall Street banking piracy of the sort he once gloried in.

As it turns out, the book presages every dire happening in the world economy that befell us in 2008-10 and puts Gekko on track to once again become a cigar-puffing power player in the global markets.

But Stone and writers Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff intend more for this sequel than charting the comeback of their leonine wheeler-dealer. To that end they introduce us to Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf, earnest but not totally convincing), a hotshot young proprietary trader who is coincidentally in love with Winnie Gekko (pixieish Carey Mulligan), Gordon’s estranged daughter. Jake and Winnie are money savvy but idealistic, and both are intent on living green lives (ecologically, not monetarily, speaking).

Stone’s jam-packed story deals somewhat predictably with a clash of values, the rocky rapprochement between Gekko and his angry daughter and Gekko’s wily negotiations with his ambitious future son-in-law, Jake.

More urgently, the story trots out a colorful array of Wall Street power players (Frank Langella as the doomed head of a faltering old-line brokerage firm; Josh Brolin as the snaky rival banker who outmatches Gekko’s grandiose ego and voracious greed; Eli Wallach as the wily old financial don) and runs them through a series of backroom scenarios and Federal Reserve Board negotiations that mirror the financial market’s real-world meltdown and eventual government bailout.

But, as is often true of Stone’s films, the message weighs heavily on the storytelling. Too often the director’s political agenda, his moral outrage and his bent for sermonizing nudge themselves to the fore and give the film a slight tang of bitter medicine.

Additionally, Stone’s reliance on flashy split-screen compositions and neon stock-market graphs superimposed on the Manhattan skyline feel self-consciously arty and distracting. Dialogue and human motivation alone should be enough to carry this operatic story.

Despite its shortcomings, the film is lifted substantially by the dynamic presence of Douglas (who is currently battling throat cancer). While Gekko is a model for the dark, avaricious side of human nature, Douglas’ performance is never less than alluring, unsettling and riveting. “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” could well put the actor in line to win his second acting Oscar for playing this silky villain.

— Dennis King

“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”

PG-13

2:13

2½ stars

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Michael Douglas, Carey Mulligan, Josh Brolin.

(Brief strong language, thematic elements)

George Romero’s original cult classic about reanimated corpses has been, well, reanimated.

The grainy, black-and-white, shoestring-budget shocker about a handful of people trapped in a remote farmhouse surrounded by flesh-eating zombies has gotten a makeover from nearly 150 international artists and animators who chose their favorite scenes and reimagined them through their own artwork.

With no holds barred on style, media or process, the result is a wildly eclectic art-show interpretation of “Night of the Living Dead” in which a single scene can begin as an animated cartoon, abruptly cut to comic book-style still panels, then finish out in hilariously crude clay animation, where live people and the walking stiffs look like they were lumped together by second-graders. And it’s all placed over the original film’s audio.

Other scenes are performed by sock puppets, CGI figures and oil painting images, making for a roller-coaster ride of low- and high-tech hilarity and horror that pays wonderfully weird and wacky homage to one of the most important works in horror film history.

A frightening feast of extras are served up, including two commentaries that are convention-like panel talks, spotlighting “Reanimated” organizer and curator Mike Schneider sharing behind-the-scenes secrets, and Stoker-winning zombie scribe Jonathan Maberry, author of “Marvel Zombies,” “Patient Zero” and “The Dragon Factory.”

The hour-plus “Zombie Encounter” features a real panel consisting of Maberry and other experts on the undead including science fiction and fantasy editor John Joseph Adams, and Dr. Kim Paffenroth, professor, religious scholar and Stoker-winning author of “Gospel of the Dead.”

Slap this one on the player, douse the lights, and enjoy an instant Halloween party.

— Gene Triplett

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Clint Walker was Cheyenne Bodie, slow to anger, fast on the draw, 6½ feet and 240 pounds of muscle; the central character in one of the most popular TV Westerns of the late 1950s, at a time when dozens of horse operas were shooting for high ratings.

But Walker walked away — twice — while the “Cheyenne” series was still riding high. Warner Bros. was working him overtime and opportunities to roam the wide open spaces of the big screen were rare.

“When they brought me there, they told me they were going to school me and groom me for features,” Walker said in a recent phone

Walker as 'Cheyenne'

interview from his home in Grass Valley, Calif. “Then they decided to do ‘Cheyenne’.”

The series debuted on Sept. 20, 1955 on ABC as television’s first hourlong Western and quickly became a hit, ranking right up there with “Gunsmoke” and “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,” which were both half-hour oaters.

It took a lot of time to make hourlong episodes.

“I seldom ever got away before 9 o’clock at night and sometimes they’d keep me there until 1:30 in the morning,” Walker said. “That’d be the whole cast of course, trying to finish up one of the ‘Cheyennes’ because we did ‘em in six days. And quite often we’d start the new one the next day.”

In 1958, the brooding gunfighter of the small screen walked out on Warner Bros. After lengthy negotiations, Walker and the studio came to terms and he returned to the show, and made his first starring appearance in a feature-length film that same year with “Fort Dobbs.”

It was the first of three Gordon Douglas-directed theatrical Westerns Walker would make for Warner Bros. “Yellowstone Kelly” followed in 1959, and was notable for featuring the leads of other then-popular Warner TV series, including Edward “Kookie” Byrnes (“77 Sunset Strip”), John Russell (“Lawman”) and Ray Danton (“The Alaskans”).

The film is now available on DVD exclusively from Warner Archive Collection (WarnerAchive.com).

“Most of it was shot in Sedona, Ariz., and in and around Flagstaff,” Walker said. “And Sedona, of course, is beautiful, beautiful country.”

Walker had the title role of as a real-life trapper and Indian scout who was drawn into a conflict between the U.S. Army and the Sioux during the days following the Little Big Horn.

“And it’s funny,” Walker said, “the character, Yellowstone Kelly, whose name was Luther, named after his dad, was about my size and I think we looked enough alike we could’ve passed for brothers. And the other funny thing was that here I am in Grass Valley, and in Paradise, Calif., about 30 miles from here, he elected to retire in 1915.”

Walker, now 83, hasn’t elected to retire at all. A native of Hartford, Ill., former Merchant Marine, Texas oil field worker and Las Vegas security officer, Walker got his first break when celebrity patrons of the casino where he worked encouraged him to try his luck in Hollywood. There he was introduced to Cecil B. DeMille, who immediately cast him in “The Ten Commandments” as a Sardinian captain.

He signed on as a contract player at Warner Bros., landed the lead on “Cheyenne,” left the series and Warner Bros. in 1962 after making his third feature for that studio (“Gold of the

Walker and Roger Moore

Seven Saints” with Roger Moore) and went on to appear in more than 20 other theatrical and TV films through the 1990s, including the role of “Posey” in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967).

His work in the Western genre was recognized in 2004 when he was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

Although he hasn’t made a film in more than a decade, Walker said he’s still ready to step back into the lights, if the role is right.

“And I’m kind of picky about what I do,” he said. “If it isn’t somethin’ I can be proud of, I won’t do it. So, I’m still capable. I can get in front of the camera and I can memorize script. I don’t have a problem there. And physically I’m in good shape. I still work out, still got all my hair and it’s its natural color (jet black). It’s never gone gray.“Although,” he added, “I had one woman who accused me, she said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. You tell people that that’s your hair and it’s its natural color. And you’re either wearin’ a toupee or you’re dying you’re hair.’ And I had to laugh. I said, ‘No, you’re wrong on both counts, ma’am.’ I think it might be my Cherokee heritage.”

Long before Hollywood branded its torrid movie-star romances with glib tags like Bennifer (Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez) and Brangelina (Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie), the tabloid headlines and Photoplay magazine spreads of the 20th century studio era were ablaze with the epic romantic antics of Liz and Dick (Lick?)

The tempestuous, on-again, off-again romance of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton is still the stuff of Hollywood legend, having earned the couple the dubious tag in their time as “the battling Burtons.”

She was a pristine beauty, a former child princess of the movie world and a notorious diva; he was a tough, hard-drinking Welshman with Shakespearean gifts and appetites. They met and fell into a steamy love affair on the set of the overstuffed 1963 epic “Cleopatra” (earning Vatican condemnation for their very public adultery) and spent the next two decades locked in a much publicized love-hate relationship that long held the world’s morbid attention.

“Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century” (Harper, $27.99) is a sprawling yet intimate 512-page report on the passionate coupling that covers the highlights and lowlights of a love affair that featured grand romantic gestures (the Taj Mahal diamond), public embarrassments (his alcoholic binges and infidelities; her tantrums), a divorce and remarriage, and co-starring film roles that often cut very close to the bone (“The Taming of the Shrew” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”).

Co-authors Sam Kashner, a veteran entertainment journalist, and Nancy Schoenberger, a respected biographer, gained the cooperation of Taylor and made scrupulous use of a collection of engaging Burton love letters and diary entries that she provided. In interviews, Taylor offers some never-before-revealed details of the pair’s colorful life together. Burton’s daughter, actress Kate Burton, also contributed honest recollections of her late father in a lengthy interview for the book.

Additionally, the authors mined a rich trove of anecdotes from wide-ranging sources, including such weighty friends of the couple as Princess Grace, Montgomery Clift, Peter O’Toole, Michael Caine, Rex Harrison, Laurence Olivier, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, John Huston, Ava Gardner and others.

Amid the juicy anecdotes, the authors also manage to put the pair’s steamy off-screen relationship into a neat social perspective, demonstrating how America’s changing attitudes toward marriage, sex, celebrity and morality often ran parallel to Taylor and Burton’s ongoing real-life melodrama.

Finally, “Furious Love” aptly shows us that larger-than-life movie icons sometimes live larger-than-life lives – big, bad, extravagant lives that make the made-up stories they act out on screen seem rather puny by comparison.

- Dennis King

This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Glamourpuss: The Lady Gaga Story”

The cult of Lady Gaga is so rabid and rarefied that only those obsessive fans willing to invest in special hardware will be able to view the British documentary “Glamourpuss: The Lady Gaga Story,” set for DVD release on Tuesday.

Those willing to pay any price to go Gaga will, according to the distributor, need a multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view this U.K. release in the U.S. and Canada. It will not play on standard American DVD players.

But those undaunted by this technical obstacle will find in this wide-ranging doc a wealth of background information on the pop-music phenomenon that has transformed the slightly gawky, gleefully eccentric New York club gal Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta into the glam-pop royalty known as Lady Gaga.

Part female incarnation of Liberace, part campy successor to the throne of Madonna and as much freaky fashion icon as top-40 hit maker, the platinum blond singer-songwriter has enjoyed a meteoric rise to international stardom since the 2008 release of her debut album, “The Fame.”

“Glamourpuss” charts that rise through interviews with friends, music critics, industry insiders and rare footage of Gaga in interviews and performance. Filled with the usual behind-the-scenes features, the film purports to be an “unauthorized” examination of Gaga’s music, her bonkers personality and her outrageous fashion sense, but nothing here seems less than celebratory. Clearly, it’s all designed to feed fans’ voracious hunger for more and more Gaga goodies.

“Glamourpuss: The Lady Gaga Story” is unrated and runs 95 minutes. It’s being released by Sexy Intellectual Productions.

- Dennis King

Actor-writer-director Tim Blake Nelson returns to his Okie roots in his wild and woolly new movie, “Leaves of Grass.” And those roots encompass an amazing array of influences: the formal discipline of Classics study at Brown University; Tulsa’s colorfully diverse Jewish community; the hyper-literate melding of comedy and violence a la the Coen Brothers; the odd marriage of rustic provincialism and worldly sophistication that informs the filmmaker’s Oklahoma upbringing.

Nelson himself is a man of many parts – a gifted character actor with a flair for earthy comedy (most famously displayed in his gem-like performance in the Coens’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”) and a celebrated playwright-filmmaker astute at tackling profound issues of morality (the existence of God in “Eye of God,” Shakespearean urgencies in “O,” and the collective Jewish conscience in “The Grey Zone”).

Those two parts come together neatly in “Leaves of Grass” (the title itself suggests a heady dichotomy – wacky tobacky or the words of Walt Whitman?), which is graced with an uncanny duel performance by star Edward Norton.

In Nelson’s enjoyably loopy mash-up of philosophy and poetry, marijuana and murder, Norton plays Oklahoma twin brothers Bill and Brady Kincaid, identical siblings who’ve traveled very different paths. Bill is a buttoned-down ivy league Classics professor and a rising academic star who long ago shook off the red dirt of his Okie past; Brady is a scruffy, loosey-goosey pot grower and toker in Little Dixie with his own homegrown philosophical take on hydroponic farming methods.

Though long estranged, the two brothers are reluctantly reunited when Brady gets crosswise with a Tulsa drug kingpin and lures Bill back home with a trumped-up family emergency and a loony scheme to extricate himself from an onerous debt.

This sets up an escalating comedy of errors, mistaken identities and pithy philosophical ramblings that inevitably lead the shaggy-dog tale off into bleaker and bloodier territory.

Along the way, Nelson populates the story with a star-studded gallery of ripe, florid supporting players – including a scenery-chewing Richard Dreyfuss as the pious-profane Jewish drug lord, Pug Rothbaum; Susan Sarandon as the twins’ pot-addled hippie mother; a game Keri Russell as a poetry-enamored teacher with a penchant for quoting Whitman and noodling giant catfish and an eye for Bill, and Nelson himself as Brady’s dim-witted, bumpkin sidekick (a familiar role that Nelson dons like a well-worn pair of clodhoppers).

And then, of course, there’s Norton, who seems to be having a grand old time occupying the warring personas of Bill and Brady. Smartly, he never condescends to either character – investing each with a prickly humanity and worldly intelligence. And he never stoops to easy parody in a virtuoso bit of acting that has him playing opposite himself (via green-screen technology) and creating two distinct, idiosyncratic characters of mind-boggling individuality.

While the narrative occasionally seems tonally erratic and at war with itself, that’s essentially in keeping with the story’s early-stated philosophical thrust – the timeless tug between Socratic order and control and the bawdy, chaotic surrender to bare instinct.

That Nelson invests “Leaves of Grass” with poetry, sturdy philosophical underpinnings, a rambling sense of dark fun and deadly danger (not to mention spiky insights into the strangeness of his hometown Tulsa) is a measure of his continued growth, daring, curiosity and refreshing irreverence as an artist. Indeed, call him Tulsa’s reigning filmmaker laureate.

- Dennis King

“Leaves of Grass”

R
1:46
3 stars
Starring: Edward Norton, Tim Blake Nelson, Keri Russell, Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss
(Violence, pervasive language, drug content)

Ben Affleck’s “The Town” is a wild, thrilling cops-and-robbers ride through some of the meanest streets of Boston that is derailed too often by over-the-top action sequences and story

Jon Hamm, left, and Ben Affleck.

 turns that strain believability.

Boston is plagued by more than 300 bank robberies a year, and most of the perpetrators come from a one-square-mile neighborhood in Boston called Charlestown, which has produced more bank and armored car robbers than anywhere else in the country, according to the screenplay by Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, based on the Chuck Hogan novel “Prince of Thieves.”

Directing himself for the first time, Affleck stars as Doug MacRay, leader of an extremely efficient and seemingly bulletproof crew of heavily-armed thieves who almost always make a clean getaway.

One of his partners in crime is Jem (the excellent Jeremy Renner of “The Hurt Locker”), a hotheaded, unpredictable and reckless dude who’s like a brother to Doug and the human nitro who could blow things for everyone.

During a tense robbery situation, Jem impulsively grabs bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) as a hostage, releasing her once the gang has gotten safely away. But when they discover Claire lives in Charlestown, Jem gets jumpy and wants to know how much she saw, even though she was blindfolded and the men had all been wearing grotesque masks.

Worried that Jem might do something rash, Doug steps in, seeking out Claire and finagling a “chance” encounter with her. She has no idea that Doug is one of the men who terrorized her; she only knows that he’s charming, and over time she begins to fall for him, and vice versa.

Passionate romance ensues, and Doug finally determines that he wants out of this life and out of town. But neighborhood crime kingpin Fergie Colm (an effectively menacing Pete Postelthwaite), whose florist shop is a front for money laundering, drug dealing and criminal enterprise, stands in his way. Fergie doesn’t want to lose the best crew leader he ever had, and he makes it plain that Doug will never get out of the business alive.

Meanwhile, local lawmen, including the fiercely determined FBI agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm of “Mad Men”) are bearing down on Doug and his boys.

“This is the not (bleeping) around crew, so get me something that looks like a print because this not (bleeping) around thing is about to go both ways,” Frawley swears.

The acting is almost uniformly solid, especially on the parts of Hall as the vulnerable Claire, who’s strong enough to resist becoming a victim, Renner as the volatile Jem, and Chris Cooper in a brief but memorable scene, nailing it dead center as Doug’s deeply embittered convict father.

But what gets in the way are the lengthy, impossibly stunt-happy, fender-shearing car chases, and the frantic, machine-gun shoot-outs on public streets, with the four hijackers standing off what seems to be most of the Boston police force and an army of local feds, escaping every time with nary a scratch. Are there really so many lousy shots in the ranks of Boston badge wearers?

And what about that scene where the gang dons nuns’ habits and scary Halloween masks, and march into a robbery in broad daylight with automatic weapons in plain sight? This isn’t going to cause passers-by to do a double-take?

And when the crew dresses as cops for a daring raid on the Fenway Park box office, shouldn’t they have shaved first for an overall authentic look?

Incredibly, nobody seems to notice these things, and the boys are free to perform their larcenous deeds unimpaired by the oblivious population.

And Affleck, the only true Bostonian among the leading players, sports a Beantown accent that at times sounds appallingly exaggerated and phony.

But putting these nitpickings aside, action lovers will score a good time, and discerning moviegoers will enjoy some good performances. Unfortunately, fans of “Gone Baby Gone,” Affleck’s excellent 2007 directorial debut, also set in Boston, may feel a bit shortchanged.

— Gene Triplett

“The Town”

R

2:05

2½ stars

Starring: Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Titus Welliver, Pete Postlethwaite, Chris Cooper.

(Strong violence, pervasive language, some sexuality and drug use)