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)

BY GENE TRIPLETT

TORONTO — Ben Affleck wanted to pull a job in his hometown of Boston. To get away with it, he imported a string of pros who he knew could fake convincing Beantown accents and

Ben Affleck

provide solid backup when the shooting started.

His accomplices were Jon Hamm (“Mad Men”), hailing from St. Louis; Jeremy Renner (“The Hurt Locker”), out of Modesto, Calif.; London native Rebecca Hall (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”); Blake Lively (upcoming “Green Lantern”), from out L.A. way; Pete Postlethwaite (“Inception”), another limey from Warrington, Cheshire, England; and Chris Cooper (“Adaptation”), of Kansas City, Mo.

Affleck’s plan was to knock over box offices nationwide with “The Town,” a heist thriller he co-wrote and directed, based on the Chuck Hogan novel “Prince of Thieves.” It opens today in theaters.

Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner

“I think the accents are a big issue because if you don’t do them well … they can really upend your movie,” Affleck said during a news conference last week at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“You have to hire really good actors to do it. I didn’t even have to know they can do it. So, when Blake came in and read the scenes, I asked her which part of Boston she was from. So, that was handled. And then with Renner — who I knew was a good actor, a great actor — I wasn’t worried about his ability to do it, I was just worried would he do it. … And so I sent him a lot of recordings.

“But more than the recordings, I found out that it’s about the people you stand next to. So, I put the right people around Jeremy without saying anything, and Jeremy’s so smart, and you could immediately see him sort of like radiating towards the people. … It was really fun to watch. And he’d show up at the set, and he had it dead to rights.”

“The Town” is about people who grew up in a one-square-mile neighborhood of Boston called Charlestown, which has produced more bank and armored car robbers than anywhere in

Jon Hamm

 the U.S., according to the authors of the film and the book.

Affleck directs himself for the first time as Doug MacRay, leader of a crew of ruthless bank robbers that always gets out clean. The only family Doug has is his partners in crime, especially Jem (Renner), a dangerous dude with a hair-trigger temper: the loose cannon of the bunch.

“I had the hardest time, I think (with the accent),” Renner said. “It’s difficult. I’m not from the region, and I thought it was one of the most important things I had to overcome. It doesn’t matter how good Ben is or how good any actor is. (If the accent sounds phony) it’s going to pop out, and it’s gonna pull people out of the movie, I think.

“So, Ben didn’t help me at all, initially. I kept calling and saying, ‘When do I get that accent coach?’ He says, ‘We’re not doing those.’ I’m like, ‘OK, great.’ ‘But I got this little tape for ya. It’s, like, some criminals talking.’ I’m like, ‘OK.’ So, yeah, he gave me a lot of actual resources. Actually, when I got to Boston, there were resources out the wazoo. So, it became easier. But the ultimate challenge is to improv on the dialect.”

Hamm, who plays the FBI agent in pursuit of Doug’s gang, said, “I had a pretty easy time with my accent on the film. It was nonexistent. No, but what Jeremy was saying is totally true. Walking around Boston is a pretty good accent coach. There are various and sundry versions of the Boston patois that you can pick out and find, and I think Renner and I had a blast exploring those particular vocal coaches.”

Affleck said Hamm didn’t really need to learn Bostonian speech patterns, since his federal agent character wasn’t really supposed to seem like a homeboy.

“We talked about it,” Affleck said, “and he and I both had the same instinct, that being from whatever it is — Illinois, Missouri, Rochester or something — being an outsider kind of said more for him than somebody who had an accent.”

Hamm did, however, take some pointers from Boston area law enforcement officers at the local, state and federal levels.

“It’s a collaborative effort between all three levels of law enforcement, and they do amazing work,” Hamm said. “There are a lot of robberies in Boston, and a lot of them get solved because of these guys’ hard work. So, it was nice to see from the inside how clear their objective is. Their job is to stop bad people from doing bad things. They’re very clear on that, so that was very helpful to me.”

But assistance from the local law was limited and unofficial. After all, the film is about a smart gang of thieves who keep giving the cops the slip.

“There were various levels of cooperation, as you astutely point out,” Affleck said in response to a question from The Oklahoman. “We were not officially embraced by the FBI, for example. We don’t use their actual logos; we’re not sanctioned by the Department of Justice. For one thing, that’s a long process, and for another thing, you end up in an editorial situation when you have to really subject your film to creative concerns that you might not want governing what you want to do.”

However, local authorities were not only cooperative but generously tolerant of the film crew when it came to shooting several spectacularly destructive car chases through Boston’s North End.

“It was difficult for us,” Affleck said of the constricted area. “We had to be very judicious about how we worked in the North End, where we parked or put the things, how much we smashed, how much we burned the cars. It just got very, very hard for us to do. And to make matters worse, it rained, so we kept postponing and postponing. We’d close all the streets, and then we wouldn’t be shooting. … The North End is now a great tourist destination, so they’re makin’ a lot of money, so we’re taking money out of people’s wallets.

“The movie is nothing if not one long apology to the people of the North End. So, I hope they like it. I wish there was a way you could bring your phone bill and get in free. But anyway, I’m sorry.”

Although “The Town” is the fourth movie Affleck has made in his hometown (the first was “Good Will Hunting” in 1997, for which he and Matt Damon won writing Oscars, and the second was his directorial debut “Gone Baby Gone” in 2007; the third was the upcoming “The Company Men”), he insists he’s not making a career out of filming movies about Boston.

“I just happened to find … stories set in Boston, and probably being from there helped me a little bit,” he said.

In fact, Affleck’s next project is far from Boston. He’ll be shooting a film with director Terrence Malick (“Days of Heaven”) in Oklahoma, in and around Bartlesville where Malick grew up, with production to begin at the end of September, according to the Oklahoma Film and Music Office. As yet, no official announcement about that film has been made.

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Ben Affleck

Open casting calls for actors and extras will be held Saturday and Sunday at Bartlesville High School for a movie being developed for filming in Bartlesville, according to a press release issued this week by Norman-based Freihofer Casting.

“With the support of the Oklahoma Film and Music Office, Freihofer Casting is conducting additional open casting calls for actors and extras to be considered for speaking and non-speaking roles in an upcoming family-oriented Hollywood romantic drama to be filmed in Oklahoma,” casting director Chris Freihofer said in the release.

Film office director Jill Simpson would not confirm recent reports that a movie directed by former Bartlesville resident Terrence Malick and starring Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams would be filmed in Bartlesville. Local officials also have declined to comment on the

Terrence Malick

reports.

“Well, we’re scouting a number of films right now and there is a major film slotted for September in the Bartlesville area, and one for October in the Oklahoma City metro, and these are high-quality productions and there’s casting going on and they are coming in, but that’s about all I can say,” Simpson told The Oklahoman on Wednesday.

Rumors about the Bartlesville film project began to spread quickly after Affleck and his wife, actress Jennifer Garner, were spotted Aug. 10 in Broken Arrow’s Bass Pro Shop, buying fishing supplies. The couple signed autographs and posed for photographs for store employees and customers.

Malick, who grew up in Bartlesville, has directed such films as “Badlands,” “Days of Heaven” and the 1998 remake of “The Thin Red Line.”

The current project held its initial casting call last weekend in Tulsa. The Bartlesville casting call will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, and from 1-5 p.m. on Sunday at the high school, located at 1700 Hillcrest Drive in Bartlesville.

The call is open to people of all ethnicities, ages 5 and up, regardless of prior acting experience. For more information, call Freihofer Casting at 310-4391.

The Wrap and Ain’t It Cool News are reporting that Ben Affleck and Rachel Weisz have joined the cast of a Terrence Malick film, set to begin filming in in Bartlesville, OK  in October.  Affleck was recently spotted at the Broken Arrow Bass Pro shop, where an employee reported Affleck said he was filming a movie, and researching a role as a fisherman.

According to the Wrap, the project, a “romantic drama,” was announced at the Berlin Film Festival.   The Wrap speculates Affleck may be replacing Christian Bale in the film.  Bale was spotted in Bartlesville in 2008, and told The Oklahoman’s George Lang he was scouting a possible film.

Oklahoma Film and Music Office Director Jill Simpson said she has not spoken with Affleck about making a film in Oklahoma.

Ben Affleck

Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of ’Shutter Island’ pays homage to Gothics

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Dennis Lehane has learned how to describe “Shutter Island” to a potential reader or viewer without giving away any of the dark plot twists or clues to the shocking surprise ending of his chilling Gothic thriller.

“I’ve had a lot of practice, so don’t worry about it,” the author said in a recent phone interview. “The first thing you would say is, ‘You’ll never see where it’s going.’ The word you hear most about this book is, ‘It’s a trip.’ I mean, it’s taking you on a pretty wild ride.”

Published in 2003, the Boston-born writer’s eighth novel, set in the year 1954, tells the story of two U.S. marshals investigating the mysterious disappearance of a murderess from a federal hospital for the criminally insane on one of the remotest of the Boston Harbor Islands.

The book became a movie in 2010 under the direction of Martin Scorsese, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as the investigators and Ben Kingsley as the institution’s inscrutable head psychiatrist. Now it’s out on DVD, and Lehane was doing a round of interviews in the hope of enticing a few more thriller lovers into taking a “trip” behind the walls of Ashecliffe Hospital, where nothing is remotely what it seems.

Rachel Solando, who murdered her children, is loose somewhere on the island, having inexplicably escaped a locked, guarded cell under constant surveillance. A killer hurricane is rolling down on the island as U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) search for the missing inmate, and Daniels is beginning to suspect the existence of radical experimentations and surgeries being performed on the patients.

Or is something wholly other going on?

Lehane is the author of two other novels turned into well respected films: “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone,” directed by Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck, respectively.

Dennis Lehane

Unlike those stories, which took a lot of time to plan out, Lehane said the complete narrative of “Shutter Island” came to him in one night — in his sleep.

“Yeah, one night I had this bizarre, almost waking dream,” he said. “It’s hard to describe. I got up, scribbled everything down on a piece of paper, woke up the next morning, and there it was.”

He wishes every book could come to him so easily.

“Yeah, that would be nice,” he said. “That would be awesome actually.”

Lehane was on the set during the making of the film, and actor Ruffalo got to know him a bit.

“Yeah, I went out and had drinks with him,” Ruffalo recalled in a separate interview conducted Sunday in Beverly Hills. “I really liked him. He’s a great guy. A great writer, really down to earth. But, you know, using that book for the movie was fantastic for me because that did 90 percent of my work.”

And Ruffalo also praised Scorsese for skillfully translating Lehane’s complex and atmospheric novel to the screen.

Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Leonardo DiCaprio, from left, in "Shutter Island."

“Scorsese, he shows you movies to inspire you,” Ruffalo said. “So we were steeped in ‘Out of the Past’ and ‘Laura’ and all of these films that were from that noir sort of period, which is Gothic. And so, basically I was trying to really do as best an impersonation as I could of Robert Mitchum. And so I think that translates really well. It’s hard to do that, especially with a book with that many turns and twists in it. It’s really hard. And so hats off to Marty again for that.”

Lehane agreed that his vision had been accurately captured on film by the director, who, surprisingly, was working from a screen adaptation written by Laeta Kalogridis.

(Lehane said he never attempts to turn his books into screenplays because “it’s just like operating on your own child if you’re a doctor. I don’t see how anybody can do it.”)

“I loved it,” the writer said. “I mean (Scorsese) got it. He got what I was playing with and what I was trying for. And he did cinematically what I did in the language of the novel. The language of the novel is heightened in such a way that you should be aware very early that you’re reading a novel, that this is an homage to Gothics, that this is basically a book about being a book in a lot of ways.

“And he made a movie about being a movie. The movie is in your face as a movie right from the beginning. You should realize very quickly you’re not in the real world, you’re in Oz.”