Ben Affleck’s second directed film, after Gone Baby Gone, is a moderately diverting, mildly despicable game of cops-and-robbers that counts, in its play for the spectator’s sympathies, on the moral depravity of the public at large, a cynical safe bet. The central character (Affleck himself), a sensitive stickup man who afterwards woos the hostage taken at his latest caper, is hoped, or more truthfully presumed, to be protected from viewer disapproval by his personal avoidance of killing any innocent parties in the application of his trade, leaving that to the violent loose cannon in his gang of four (Jeremy Renner from The Hurt Locker, and still the cowboy), never mind his legal status as an accessory in such killings or his earnest attempts, when the bullets start flying fast and thick, to add to them firsthand. Even viewers who remain morally alive and kicking can be grateful for a crime thriller grounded in gritty reality; grateful at the abstinence from music-video visuals, explosions, martial arts, superheroes and archvillains; grateful enough to put up stoically with such standard usages as the raw rough grainy image (for grittier reality), the chopping off of the tops of heads at the tops of frames (for closer closeups), and the jittery jumpy jostled camera (for peak action); grateful enough not to squirm overmuch at the protracted car chase or the climactic full-scale warfare at the Boston “cathedral,” Fenway Park. They can follow along through all of that in a half-hooked, half-wriggling kind of way, until, at last, they fully realize where the filmmaker’s sympathies lie, and more than just sympathies, his sentimentalities, his laxities, his, well, insensitivities. Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Blake Lively, Chris Cooper, Pete Postlethwaite. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd
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