Hollywood Product: The Town

GENRE: Crime drama

THE PITCH: Tough but noble thief Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) falls in love with bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall), who doesn’t know that Doug’s gang recently took her hostage. Other speed bumps on the road to romance include the hair-trigger temper of Doug’s partner Gem (The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner) and the dogged investigation of FBI agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm).

MONEY SHOTS: When Doug’s gang knocks over Claire’s bank, they do clever tricks like microwave the bank’s security discs. Gem unmasks while administering a beating in one of many signs of dangerous recklessness. A high-speed chase/shoot-out through Boston’s painfully narrow streets. A cop catches the gang in their nuns-on-the-run disguises and has a priceless, deadpan reaction. A scary shoot-out at Fenway Park.

BEST LINE: “Five o’clock, I slide down the back of a brontosaurus’s tail like Fred Flintstone,” Doug claims of his cover job “breaking rocks.”

SUBTLEST LINE: When Claire talks about the hostage situation, Doug says, “Sorry.” Claire tells him “It wasn’t your fault” — but we know it totally was.

POLITICAL LINE: “We’ll never get 24 hour surveillance unless one of those idiots converts to Islam,” Adam gripes, reflecting the priorities of the War on Terror.

FASHION STATEMENTS: Doug & Co. favor such disguises as skulls with dreadlocks, ghostly nun masks and war-painted hockey masks. The film kind of amounts to a stubble-off between Affleck’s precise chin-bristle and Hamm’s slovenly five o-clock shadow. As Doug’s old flame, Blake Lively stalks around bars in skank-wear. My colleague Ed Adams counted 16 tattoos between the various characters.

BODY COUNT: Relatively low for this kind of film, given that the first hour emphasizes violent beat-downs over killings. There’s at least three deaths (not counting a couple of probably nonfatal shootings) by the end.

FLESH FACTOR: Affleck shows off his own six-pack abs while Doug exercises. Doug and the gang scrub in the shower before a robbery, to minimize the chance of leaving hairs or other DNA traces behind. Scenes of celebratory strippers pass too quickly for the audience to see much skin.

SOUNDTRACK HITS: Husky Irish-American rapper Slaine, who plays a member of Doug’s gang, sings “99 Bottles” and “Run In.”

ON TOP OF OLD SMOKEY: Amid such tough-guy actors as Pete Postlethwaite’s crime boss and Chris Cooper as Doug’s inmate dad, Titus Welliver, aka “Lost’s” Man in Black, stands out with a small but appealing role as Adam’s partner.

HEY, WAIT A MINUTE: Is the “one square-mile neighborhood of Charlestown” really the world’s biggest source of bankrobbers? And why does Bahston native Affleck seem to be doing the most obvious accent?

THE BOTTOM LINE: Affleck’s sophomore effort as a director proves that his strong debut Gone Baby Gone was no fluke. The movie star gets strong performances from his actors, although he tends to oversell Doug’s reluctant criminal-shtick, and Hamm hasn’t quite mastered the barking aggressiveness of a macho lawman. And for a film called the The Town, the script pays less attention to the texture of the community than the clichés of crime melodrama, but at least Affleck lights a fire under the familiarity.