The Town has climbed back up Netflix’s charts, which is a pretty neat trick for a crime thriller that first landed in theaters in 2010. More than 15 years later, Ben Affleck’s film is back in front of viewers and back in the conversation.
A few headlines have put a lot of weight on Titus Welliver, but this is really a Ben Affleck movie through and through. Welliver plays detective Dino Ciampa in a supporting role. Affleck co-wrote it, directed it, and stars as Charlestown robber Doug MacRay, whose life starts to come apart after a heist puts pressure on him from both the police and his own crew.
It’s not hard to see why The Town is connecting again. The action is tightly staged, the writing is sharp, and the movie has real character drama under all the gunfire. There’s street-level tension, a few explosive set pieces that still land, and a cast that includes Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, and Blake Lively. It also helps that streaming audiences keep showing up for crime thrillers, and several people in that cast are even bigger names now than they were back then.
This Netflix run feels less like a rediscovery and more like a return. The movie was already well established, with a 92% score on Rotten Tomatoes, more than $154 million at the box office according to Box Office Mojo, and a single Oscar nomination at the Academy Awards for Jeremy Renner’s James “Jem” Coughlin. It also sits on that stretch of Affleck’s career between Gone Baby Gone and Argo.
If you’re in the mood for a solid thriller, The Town is still worth queuing up. What’s less clear, at least for now, is how big this revival really is. Most of the reporting has stayed focused on U.S. performance, with very little out there on international viewership, audience demographics, how much Netflix is promoting it, or any fresh comments from the cast or filmmakers.
You can watch The Town on Netflix.
