Cliched mob movie that should sleep with the fishes
LIVE BY NIGHT is a period gangster film based on a novel by Dennis Lehane. It has impressive credentials. Its director, writer and star is Ben Affleck, Sienna Miller plays his girlfriend and Brendan Gleeson his father.
Affleck is also co-producer, with Leonardo DiCaprio among others.
Now, Affleck is older than his brother Casey, more accomplished and more famous. But this week the spotlight shifts.
The younger sibling has been getting rapturous reviews for his performance in a very good film, Manchester By The Sea (see above).
But Live By Night is not much of a film and Affleck is not especially good in it. He is never wooden as an actor, but he can be stolid. He is at his most stolid here.
He plays Joe Coughlin, who returns to Boston from World War I determined never to follow orders again, and becomes a crook, robbing banks and illicit poker games.
Soon he is recruited by an Irish gangster, Albert White ( Robert Glenister), but when Albert finds out that Joe is having an affair with his sexy Irish girlfriend Emma (Miller), their relationship goes south and so, in due course, does Joe.
He signs up with Albert’s deadly rival, Boston’s mafia boss Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone) and heads down to Tampa, Florida, where he oversees a rum-running business, builds a casino, takes on the Ku Klux Klan and falls out with the local police chief (Chris Cooper). Somewhere in all of this, a decent film lurks. But it is weighed down by a screenplay so cliche-ridden and derivative that really, it deserves to sleep with the fishes.
Live By Night borrows heavily from the rich treasury of Prohibition-era gangster movies without remotely adding to it. And Affleck has miscast himself, though it’s hard to know who could have breathed much credibility into Joe, a character we are meant to admire for his strong moral and romantic fibre, despite all those ruthless criminal activities.
In its favour, the film does have Gleeson at his world-weary craggiest, a few other fine performances (notably by Miller and Cooper), and gleaming production values so burnished that you can practically see your face in them.
But its two hours and nine minutes feels twice as long.
Live By Night (15) Verdict: Turgid and derivative ★★✩✩✩