Good review Scott...
I have "The Town" blu-ray also. I am wondering what was included in the extended version? I don't much care for that marketing strategy of putting out more than one blu with different versions of the film. Different set of extras ok, I am not keen on that either but it makes some sense. But If I am part of the select few already buying blu-ray then I should have a Theatrical and Extended cut seamlessly branched in even the bare bones.
***spoilers***
As for the film itself, I liked it with reservations. With a genre film such as this you hope you will get lots of tense scenes of them planning and carrying out their robberies. I think the film delivers on this reasonably well with action sequences shot with some real aplomb. There were other instances where I was taken out of the movie because I knew exactly the scene in another movie that Affleck and his co-writers were cribbing from. Of course because it is an Affleck movie it is as I think he believes his civic duty to give the ladies their monies worth with several shots of Affleck working out and showing off his broad shoulders. Affleck looked a bit to me like the old GI Joe's I used to have when they still painted on the hair. Affleck and all his douchebaggery cannot it seems get out of it's own way in this picture. He naturally has to become romantically entangled with the one witness that can put them away. Despite the fact that Affleck's character seemed fully committed to a reckless lifestyle of fast money and thrills we find out now that he just wants to hang it all up for the woman he loves. The film sort of devolves into a sort of "Will he or won't he?" "Will she or won't she?" ala the "Thomas Crown Affair" if Thomas Crown had dropped out to get his GED. At the end I was amazed at what a guy would do for a girl he just met a week ago and how he could rationalize (in a corny voice over) that he was taking responsibility for what he'd done not from a jail cell mind you but from some hideout in some bayou somewhere?
