Live By Night

While Ben Affleck vehicles have always been a mixed bag, the majority of his biggest successes had the same director: Affleck himself. Gone Baby Gone was the beginning of his revival, The Town made him a viable actor once again, and Argo earned him Oscar nominations and a win. As such, it makes sense that Affleck would head back to another crime drama after the critical bashing from Batman v Superman. This time around its a Prohibition-era gangster flick called Live by Night.

Ben Affleck stars as Joe Coughlin, a WWI veteran turned small-time gangster that's taken up with a mob boss' girl in Boston. However, after a series of misadventures puts him in the hospital and takes everyone he cares away from him, Coughlin heads south to Tampa to assist a rival gangster's rum running business. Soon the former small time criminal is engaged in a struggle against the Klu Klux Klan, religious zealots, and mobsters for control of the region.

With bad movies you tend to get two camps. The first is a category which I'll dub "where do I start?" meaning there's so much wrong with the film from the script, the acting, and everything else in between it's really hard to find the true deal-breaker in the bunch. The second, which Live by Night falls into, are the "fatal flaw" movies which have one problem so distinctive that it torpedoes the entire movie. What is Live by Night's fatal flaw? A lack of focus or rather too much focus on the wrong things.

The best example is the movie's time spent in Boston where Coughlin gets involved with a mob girlfriend. In a different movie this would be a quick montage of images that sends Coughlin on the path to Tampa and establishes his skill set, his motivations, and his rivalries. Instead, the movie takes it's time in Boston trying to establish an emotional core that never sets in. At first it feels like it's about a doomed romance....until Coughlin's policeman father shows up to scold the way of life he's chosen. Then it looks like it's a run and gun gangster picture with a period appropriate car chase and shootout...until it becomes about betrayal, vengeance, and tragedy. And this is all in the movie's first act.

It's odd but the movie has a consistent problem with focusing just long enough to make us curious but not sticking around long enough to fully explain itself. The racial dynamics of the area at the time are fascinating and timely. So why doesn't Coughlin need a thorough explanation or an even better question how does this Irish-Catholic Boston gangster seem to need no time to adjust to a life among Black Americans and Cuban immigrants? The movie introduces a war between Coughlin's Cuban rum runners and the KKK, something you could frame an entire movie around, and seemingly ends the squabble in a brisk 15 minutes. There's so much meaty material here and all of it gets just enough life to get our attention, but not enough to make us care.

It's all incredibly frustrating because Affleck, despite the script's faults, remains a very competent director. The shot selection is very solid, there's a couple of interesting scenes, and the set pieces including the aforementioned car chase are well-staged and somewhat fun. Likewise, the movie is stacked with talented actors who clearly wanted to work with Affleck including Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, and Sienna Miller. The whole film is competently made which actually makes the script's failures more frustrating.

Intriguing with no payoff, Live by Night has all of the production values in place but a story that fails to execute. You can skip this.