Starring Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, and Jon Hamm. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, September 17

Ben Affleck is way sexier as a tattooed bank robber than he ever was playing those suckhole leading-man roles Hollywood once squashed him into. He always looked so damn uncomfortable then. Okay, sorry: make no mistake, The Town is a gritty, moody film with intense cops-and-criminals shootouts, chilling Irish gangsters, and Boston neighbourhoods where you’d best stay in your cah. It’s just that Affleck is playing the kind of guy you definitely shouldn’t talk to in the laundromat, but a girl simply has to. She does.

This romantic-hearted crime thriller’s twist is that Claire (Rebecca Hall) and Doug (Affleck) have met before—unbeknownst to her—when his crew robbed the bank she managed and briefly took her hostage. (The guys were wearing Skeletor masks and wielding AK-47s at the time.) Co-crook Jem (Jeremy Renner), menacing, unpinned grenade to Doug’s brains and sensitivity, later suggests whacking Claire. Instead, Doug falls for her—inconvenient when an FBI guy (Jon Hamm) is on his tail and surveilling hers.

The other twist is that Affleck—besides co-adapting Chuck Hogan’s novel Prince of Thieves with Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard—directed The Town (his second feature, after the also Boston-set Gone Baby Gone). His sometimes overly idealistic film doesn’t transcend its genre as Heat, the masterfully gripping predecessor it steals from, does but Affleck stages some pretty tightly wound scenes, including the cranked-up heist sequences. And he and his excellent cast have a real feel for damaged characters.

Besides breeding more bank and armoured-car robbers than anywhere else in America, tough Charlestown also breeds OxyContin-dealing single mother Krista (Blake Lively) and Doug’s incarcerated criminal father Stephen (Chris Cooper). But most disturbing of all is Pete Postlethwaite’s florist-mobster. Never has a guy trimming roses been more dead-eyed scary.