Ben Affleck the director has always been more skilled than Ben Affleck the actor. In his new movie, Live by Night, Affleck miscasts himself in a story of bootleggers and gangsters and dangerous dames set during the Prohibition era where he plays a gangster who too easily falls in love with the wrong woman (Sienna Miller, doing her best Irish accent), only to have his heart - and a few of his bones - broken as a result. His Joe Coughlin is a bland, stiff goon whose expression hardly changes, and whose bad-ass gangsta persona is not an aura he exudes; instead, he has to talk about it, and tell his enemies how mean he can really be. Coughlin romances a Cuban beauty (Zoe Saldana), battles a bigot (Matthew Maher, playing yet another loathsome character in an Affleck movie) who keeps shooting up his club, and he faces both the Irish and the Italian mob in a pretty forgettable anti-climactic shootout. There's also an obligatory car chase involving cops-and-robbers, and plenty of sit-downs between gangsters and police officials, and some really nice cinematography (by the great Robert Richardson).
What the movie doesn't have, however, is a story worth following, or characters that we give a damn about, because it has too much story, and not nearly enough plot. Live by Night is a product of a very successful Hollywood actor-director who simply isn't talented enough as a writer to adapt Dennis Lehane's novel (of the same name) to the big screen successfully; it may be time for Mr. Affleck to direct someone else other than himself for a change. This vanity project of his is as forgettable as his recent outing as Batman, but without the box office success to justify its pointless existence.
D+
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