Weekend Movie - The Town

I hope everyone had a great, super hot weekend. Since it was so hot, my family and I decided to see a movie. I mean what better place to spend your hot day than in a room with the AC on full blast watching a movie? Anyway, we decided to see The Town. It's written by, directed by, and starring Ben Affleck. We all heard amazing things about the movie. I never saw Good Will Hunting so I wasn't really sure of his capabilities. The movie was pretty good. Nothing super special like we all kept hearing, but it was pretty good. It's about these bank robbers and everything in the story is typical of a bank robber story. They rob a bunch of banks and eventually get caught. This movie was basically every bank robber movie rolled up into one. By the end, I was still impressed that Ben Affleck did all the work until I saw that the movie is based on a book called Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan. Now I'm not so impressed. He pretty much read a book and wrote the movie word for word. This is the description of the book:

The dark third novel by the author of The Standoff isn't the fast-paced thriller it's marketed to be. It is, rather, a story of doomed love focusing on Doug MacRay, a Boston-based career thief (he comes from Charlestown, "a breeding ground for bank and armored-car robbers") who becomes enamored with the manager of the bank he and his pals have just robbed. Claire Keesey, who has been badly traumatized by the robbery, later begins to develop feelings for him as well, unaware that a masked MacRay was the lead perpetrator in the heist that turned her life upside down. Hogan then leads readers through a long-winded labyrinth of inner reflection as Doug spends much of the book pondering whether he should quit the criminal life in order to pursue a deeper relationship with Claire.

And this is the description of the movie:

A divide begins to open between two career criminals when Jem takes bank manager Claire Keesey hostage during a particularly tense heist, and the group subsequently discovers that she hails from their own tight-knit suburb. When Jem proposes that the gang make an effort to find out just how much Claire recalls about the crime, Doug fears that his volatile partner may do more harm than good and volunteers himself for the job. Later, Doug turns on the charm while pretending to bump into Claire by chance, and becomes convinced that she doesn't suspect him of being the same man who just robbed her bank. As the feds turn up the heat on the gang, Doug finds himself falling for Claire, and searching desperately for a means of cutting his ties to his criminal past.

Sounds exactly the same to me. So Ben Affleck didn't really write anything. He kind of just copied what another writer wrote. Sad day. Other than that, the movie is action filled and entertaining. Be sure to bring your Boston accent ear though because sometimes Ben Affleck goes a little over board and it's hard to understand what he says sometimes.