A group of Boston-bred gangsters set up shop in balmy Florida during the Prohibition era, facing off against the competition and the Ku Klux Klan. Boston, 1926. The '20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world. Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city's most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw. But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one-neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover-can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt. Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa's Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue. "Maybe it's true. We all find ourselves in lives we didn't expect. But what I learned was powerful men don't have to be cruel."Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck) <br/><br/>Yet in the best of gangster, powerful men like Michael Corleone and Henry Hill are cruel, no matter how gentle their exteriors. So it seems with Joe Coughlin, a prohibition "bandit," as he calls himself, who doesn't think of himself as a gangster ("I don't wanna be a gangster. Stopped kissing rings a long time ago."). Yet he kills or has others killed in the name of moving toward heaven.<br/><br/>Although beautifully appointed and set in Florida and Cuba, writer/director Affleck's crime story misses the weight of crime films, which casually juxtapose the serious with the not so. It lacks the sass of Pulp Fiction and the gravitas of The Godfather with not much of their verbal gymnastics or irony.<br/><br/>Joe wanting to be a saint while being a sinner requires an actor of considerable resources, which Affleck showed a modicum of recently in the Accountant because it required him to be affectless. He brings that same stolid mien to this film and endangers the edge necessary for the success of actors like Al Pacino. Like Affleck, the film is listless except when Tommy Guns take charge.<br/><br/>As Joe navigates from a low-rent lover, Emma (Sienna Miller), to a classy love, Graciella (Zoe Saldana), director Affleck spends too much time on their embraces and too little on what makes him love them so passionately. He does love his own image as his abundance of self close-ups testifies. Maybe there is no passion, just old affectless Affleck.<br/><br/>It's dumping time in Hollywood, and Live by the Night is a classic example of why smart studios dump dull movies in January. It's not all that bad the way Joe is not all that bad. However, it just doesn't have the firepower to go against the big guns in the Oscar race. Remember the wild surprises and rich characters of the long-form Sopranos? <br/><br/>Maybe that's why the film gangster genre feels troubled here: The arch enemy, TV! Live By Night tells the story of gangster Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck) as he rises, falls then rises again through the criminal underworlds of Boston and Miami. Chronicling his life throughout the prohibition era in America, Joe becomes involved in the most nefarious of situations. He survives a bank heist gone wrong in which a police officers winds up dead, he survives a long stint in prison caused by the betrayal of his femme fatale Emma (Sienne Miller), he goes through so much in the film that you start to wonder less about what is going to happen than as to why it is happening. This is a film that feels incomplete, rushed and all together shallow. Ben Affleck, who has given us some pretty incredible films up until now, shows his weaknesses as a screenwriter but continues to give us more than enough to chew when it comes to his direction.<br/><br/>While I did want more out of this film, there is no denying that Affleck can most certainly stage some breathtaking action sequences. He knows when to get close, he knows what to show and when to show it. Live By Night is no exception to that standard in regards to how everything is shown. Some major highlights of the film include a vicious car chase through a country back road, copious amounts of bloody shootouts and brutal fights throughout yet we feel disengaged by what is going on. We don't know enough about anyone in the film outside of Joe to be connected to them, let alone feel bad when someone dies. To be quite honest, the film is 128 minutes and has about 100 characters in it…none of which you end up caring about. This comes down on the shoulders of Affleck as a screenwriter. In many ways, the film plays out like a highlight reel to a HBO mini-series such as Boardwalk Empire. It never really lets us simmer in slow burn human drama and instead gives us an action packed gangster film that is more on the level of Gangster Squad than White Heat. <br/><br/>If there is one thing that I've grown to expect going into a Ben Affleck film, it is that I'm bound to be blown away by the cast if all else fails. While the performances in this film are good, some of them even excellent, it really doesn't translate well when you just don't care about them. Ironically, in a film that is geared towards male characters and dominated by such, the women in this film give tremendous performances. Sienna Miller and Zoe Saldana stand out as two performances that were truly powerhouse even if their screen time collectively added up to maybe twenty minutes all together.<br/><br/>Then there is Chris Messina, who was a bit hard to judge here, considering he is playing a character from the 1930s underworld, but it was extremely hard to take him seriously during times when you wanted nothing more than to be able to take him seriously. At first, I figured he was the comic relief but then I was left waiting for him to drop the act and be serious for a moment. While I know Messina is a phenomenal actor, I just could not take him seriously in this role. Unfortunately, I thought he was too over the top. No matter what my thoughts on Messina were, he still did not compare to how I felt about Ben Affleck's performance as Joe.<br/><br/>While I am a big fan of Ben Affleck, I was severely let down by his performance in this film. I've read about the differences between the film and the novel regarding the age and honestly, I don't really care about that. The film is the film and the book is the book. That isn't my issue here. My issue is how wooden Affleck went to portray Joe. There was nothing new, nothing deep about this character which is pretty disappointing considering both The Town and Gone Baby Gone had tremendous lead characters that made us care about what happens to them. Unfortunately, this isn't the case here. This film does very little to make us care about any character, let alone our lead. Many will argue that watching a criminal empire get built is fascinating no matter how many times we see it, and I agree with that. But when you have someone as uninteresting as Joe Coughlin, something that is supposed to be fun to watch turns into a chore. That is probably the most frustrating thing about this film.<br/><br/>Overall, Live by Night is a throwback to classical gangster films that serves as Ben Affleck's worst directorial effort. With that being said, the film still features some truly thrilling action sequences that are bound to satisfy many even if the film is a bloated mess that should have been larger than what is or nothing at all. Live by Night is clearly Affleck’s love letter to classic pulp, and almost no noir touchstone goes unturned in its two-hour-plus run.
Chrsherr replied
355 weeks ago