Ben Affleck, why did you make this movie?

WE ALL know he is an accomplished director. So how did Live By Night become this confusing, boring mess?

REVIEW

WHY, Ben Affleck? Why did you make this movie?

The older Affleck brother has proven that he is an excellent director with an impressive command of filmmaking nous from the moment he stepped behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone. He followed it up with the decent The Town and the thrilling Argo.

But something really went off the rails in the vacuous Live By Night.

Perhaps it’s because Affleck wrote the screenplay by himself (he’s previously only collaborated with others, notably with Matt Damon on the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting). Or maybe Dennis Lehane’s book wasn’t the right source material to adapt for the screen.

Because Live By Night is a confusing jumble. But above all, it commits the cardinal sin of gangster movies: It’s really, really boring.

Joe Coughlin (Affleck) returns from World War I disenfranchised by the arbitrary violence and barbarism. He decides he can no longer trust those in power that sent him to the battlelines in the first place and becomes an outlaw, robbing banks and speakeasies in the era of Prohibition.

The son of a prominent Boston cop, it’s not long before he’s drawn into the city’s gang war between the Irish Albert White and Italian Maso Pescatore. After a tragedy and a three-year stint in prison, Joe goes to Pescatore and ends up in his employ. He’s sent to Florida to shore up and expand the gang’s operation of illegal rum runs from the south.

“I’ve made a huge mistake.”

There, he starts a relationship with a Cuban businesswoman (Zoe Saldana), which gees up the local KKK members who, besides being racist, are also annoyed about something else (maybe?). And there’s something about a reformed heroin junkie preacher (Elle Fanning) who’s threatening to derail his casino plans and being at odds with the Pescatore head because he didn’t introduce drugs into Tampa? Yeah. Hot mess.

The main problem with Live By Night, besides the hokey dialogue, is the plotting. There are so many unnecessary subplots that become the main plot, the film never comes together with any sort of narrative momentum. It’s incoherent, never establishes the real conflict and just as you start to invest in one aspect, it shifts focus. By midway, you won’t care what happens to any of these characters. Live or die, win or lose — meh, pass the popcorn, I’m bored.

None of the actors have any chemistry with each other and Affleck spends the whole movie looking bored and stone-faced. Chris Messina’s “uglification” as Joe’s sidekick Dion is bewildering — what character or story purpose did a double chain and a fat suit possibly serve? It distracts from every scene he’s in.

So much promise comes up empty.

Meanwhile, Affleck’s monotone narration only highlights how many moving parts the film failed to tie up, and it’s always been a genre convention that better suited film noir than gangster movies.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that there was a superior movie in Live By Night, buried under its terrible screenplay and lacklustre performances. Affleck has a great eye — his textured mise-en-scene and framing are undeniably beautiful to watch. And he is fantastic at shooting action scenes — a frenetic car chase near the beginning and the big shoot-out at the end is proof of his confident staging of elaborate sequences. We know he’s a better director than this movie suggests.

Unfortunately, this serious misstep by Affleck is a bad omen for his next big project, the standalone Batman movie in the DC superheroes franchise. Affleck was supposed to come along and rescue the so far odious DC franchise with his directorial hand, but Live By Night surely puts this in doubt.

Rating: 2/5

Live By Night is in cinemas from today.

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