10 Great Boston Irish crime thrillers

For a limey from the home counties of England, director Peter Yates sure knew his way around an American crime classic. Like the equally under-hailed The Hot Rock, this one lingers in the shadows of his ’Frisco icon, Bullitt, but its measured character study of a low-level Boston hoodlum deserves a closer look. Robert Mitchum is Coyle, a gun runner for the Boston mob. Too valuable to move roles, not valuable enough to promote, he’s a blue collar family man bound to a code that will sink him. The book that it’s based on, written by Boston lawyer George V Higgins, informs a grittily realistic look at the city’s criminal underworld. Fun fact: Quentin Tarantino borrowed one of the film’s character's names for Jackie Brown.

With a bald patch and piercing blue contacts, Johnny Depp looks like someone going to a Halloween party as an evil Ron Howard in this Scorsese-lite crime epic. He plays one of South Boston’s most notorious nutcases, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, with over 15 years of drug-dealing, gun-running and the odd request for soon-to-be-dead people to ‘get in the fackin’ cahhrr’. Bostonians will need to hang in there past some of the accent work, but the cast runs deep – Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons, Joel Edgerton, Dakota Johnson, Kevin Bacon et al – and it offers a blood-soaked map of the city’s ’70s and ’80s bad old days of crime and corruption.

It took a while for him to accept the role, but Jack Nicholson was born to play ruthless South Boston Irish crime capo, Frank Costello, in this reworking of Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. His menacing performance might have brought shudders of recognition from anyone who grew up in the city. Costello is more than loosely based on Whitey Bulger, the ruthless crime kingpin and informant for the FBI, whose ever-shifting nexus of loyalties and debts inform much of the movie’s double-crossing plotline. Boston boys Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon keep the local accents on point, although the eagle-eyed might spot some New York locations doubling up for the city on screen. Trust nothing and no one in this one.

Boston’s oldest neighbourhood, Charlestown, is the world’s capital of bank robbers. What better place to set a heist thriller about a tight-knit cadre of modern-day bandits? But Ben Affleck’s adaptation of Chuck Hogan’s novel ‘Prince of Thieves’ is more than just a cordite-and-screeching-tyres action flick. The Cambridge-raised actor-director looks into the soul of the city’s harder-scrabble neighbourhoods to ask what drives these men (and it is men) to choose violent crime. Affleck plays one of them – Doug MacRay – who gets caught between his girl (Rebecca Hall) and his mates. The city is, in the old cliché, a character here, too: an old bank building doubles up for one of the gang’s targets, while Charlestown locals even pop up as extras.

Ted Demme’s intimate crime drama follows a group of boyhood friends who grew up into a life of crime in a dead-beat corner of Boston’s inner city. Colm Meaney is the ringleader, a Whitey Bulger-like gangster, but Monument Ave. is the story of Bobby (Denis Leary), a lower-level hood who just wants to skip town with beautiful mobster’s moll Katy (Famke Janssen). Not easy to find, but well worth tracking down, it’s a great example of how Irish mob thrillers present a life without ornamentation, where not even family, food and domestic rituals offer much consolation to a hard, violent lifestyle. These footsoldiers don’t even get the cannoli.

‘A king knows what to do and does it. Even when it’s hard.’ That Shakespearean epithet summons up the dark swells that run through Clint Eastwood’s neo-noir set in the low-rise ’burbs of the city’s north. The ‘king’ is Sean Penn’s Jimmy Markum, an ex-con whose daughter’s murder upsets a fragile balance in the city. Childhood friends Dave Boyle (Kevin Bacon) and Jimmy Markum (Tim Robbins), and their wives, are soon relitigating past injuries and fighting for survival. All of the characters – cops, criminals, bystanders – are caught up in a violent tide of destiny. This happens a lot in Hollywood’s Boston.

Director Troy Duffy was hailed as the new Tarantino when he emerged with this crime yarn that he wrote while working a bar job. A buzz script at the time, it barely made a scratch at the box office, but became a huge word-of-mouth hit on VHS and enshrined Willem Defoe’s gay FBI detective Paul Smecker as a cult hero. It follows two Irish Catholic brothers (Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus), who decide to rid Boston of crime – starting with the Russian mob. It’s not subtle (there are 246 uses of the word ‘fuck’) but has a certain grimy energy – even if Duffy turned out not to be the new Tarantino after all.

Mixing up the genre with a flashback to the city’s Prohibition days of bootleggers, mobsters and molls is Ben Affleck’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel. It has all the ingredients of a proper Untouchables-style gangland epic but is, sadly, a bit of a clunker. Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, a mobster who tries – and fails – to extricate himself from his life of crime and settle down with his gal (Sienna Miller). All done in the grand Warner Brothers style, it’s a glossier take on the Beantown thriller than most. Our advice? Watch the other Boston-set Lehane adaptations – Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River – first.

Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke play a couple of hardscrabble Southies in this gritty street-level parable about a man trying to keep on the straight and narrow after a spell in prison. Writer-director Brian Goodman knows of what he speaks: it’s based on his own life. Ruffalo plays the Goodman role, while the director himself appears as local heavy Pat Kelly. The final act delivers one those old ‘one last job’ storylines, but as an authentic look at the vice grip the criminal life has on blue collar schlebs and their families. It makes for an often gripping morality tale.

Not exactly a traditional Boston crime thriller (no one gets gunned down in the back of an Oldsmobile, for starters), but a fun buddy-cop spin on the genre nonetheless. Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy play Sarah Ashburn and Shannon Mullins, a tight-coiled New York FBI agent and a sweary Boston beat cop who come to a grudging respect as they track down a drug dealer across the city’s badder ’burbs. It’s full of classic tropes, only, you know, way funnier than when Ben Affleck or any of the Wahlberg siblings are involved. The scene in which a bamboozled Ashburn gets grilled by her partner's seriously Boston Irish family – ‘Aar yoo or aar yoo naat.. a narck?!’ – is an all-timer.