Watch CBS News

Movie Review: 'Live By Night'

By Bill Wine

KYW Newsradio 1060

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Ben Affleck wears four hats – star, writer, producer, and director – on his latest film, his first directorial outing since 2012's Oscar winner for Best Picture, Argo.

Live by Night is Affleck's fourth film as a director, following Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and Argo. And as with his debut in the director's chair, Gone Baby Gone, it's based on a novel by Dennis Lahane.

Meanwhile, on-screen, he has discarded the Batsuit and gone baby gone from superheroic to antiheroic.

 

2
(2 stars out of 4)

 

Live by Night is an organized crime drama set in the Prohibition era.

It wants to be a throwback to – while paying homage to -- the classic gangster flicks of, say, 80 years ago, starring the likes of Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson.

Affleck stars as Joe Coughlin, a veteran of World War I, a soldier who becomes an outlaw by turning to a life of crime as a way of chasing down the American dream in its darkest form.

He's in love with the girlfriend of a mob boss, played by Sienna Miller, and at odds with his father, a police captain played by Brendan Gleeson.

After starting on the mean streets of Boston, he moves to sweltering Tampa as a bootlegger, aided by buddy Chris Messina, and then gets romantically involved with a Cuban woman played by Zoe Saldana, with whom he forms a rum-running partnership that puts him in the path of the Ku Klux Klan. Then he relocates to touristy, thirsty Havana.

As Affleck's love letter to classic pulp, Live by Night is a power fantasy that examines ambition and corruption, mixing in the ingredients that have always served the genre – well-dressed hoods, stylish fedoras, double-crosses, shootouts, and flameouts.

Like Affleck's Joe, the film has big plans. But in inventorying the generic old-school checklist of gangster-flick conventions, Affleck has crammed in far too many of Lahane's subplots: the film is too busy by half.

Watching it is a bit like seeing an entire season of a television series at one sitting. More is definitely less in this case.

And far too often it seems as if Affleck and his supporting cast are playing dress-up rather than inhabiting their roles.

Which is one of the reasons why this outing will break Affleck's string of Oscar nominees emerging from each of his films thus far (Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone, Jeremy Renner in The Town, and Alan Arkin in Argo).

Affleck wants his period drama to haunt us. But it never really gets under our skin and it never really turns us from observers into participants. Part of the reason for that is that we never settle comfortably into a groove in terms of how we feel about this character we're spending so much time with? Is he a good guy? A bad guy? Both? Neither?

That's why we'll steal 2 stars out of 4. Live by Night looks great. But it's neither criminally entertaining nor entertainingly criminal.

 

More Bill Wine Movie Reviews

CBS Philly Entertainment News

Area Movie Events

View CBS News In
CBS News App Open
Chrome Safari Continue
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.