Live By Night - movie review
Live By Night
Plot: 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.
Cast: Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson
Director: Ben Affleck
Certificate: 15 (very strong language, strong violence, sex, racist language)
Runtime: 2hrs 9 mins
Release Date: Friday 13th January 2017
Two Affleck films released in one week. Do those siblings ever stop? This time round, the focus rests on the shoulders of Ben Affleck who stars and directs this film. With three highly praised directorial ventures already placed under his Batman utility belt, Live By Night was fairly anticipated by myself. His track record so far has been faultless and he was tackling a gangster tale based off of a successful novel and had managed to score himself one humdinger of a cast. Every single molecule of the lead up to this film seemed that it was a sure hit. Unfortunately, Live By Night is a reminder that even the most talented of directors can have misfires and even though Live By Night isn't bad, compared to Affleck's previous films, it's his weakest so far.
I love Ben Affleck. He is gradually becoming a movie star. He's defied all the odds and became one of my favourite incarnations of Batman and he was incredible in last year's The Accountant. The only flaw that I have with him as an actor is that I don't think he lives up to his full potential when he's directing himself. It might be a case that his focus is shifted on making sure everyone else is doing the right job that he can't get a chance to evaluate his own performance or, in the other films he stars in not directed by himself, the director is giving him feedback and advice to work on. The next film he's scheduled to direct is The Batman so he obviously has to star in that but when Affleck directs his next independent picture, I would like to see him take much more of a backseat and focus on the directing because he has proven himself a competent director. As for his actual performance, Affleck is fine but throughout the whole film I couldn't help but feel there were plenty of other actors who could have been far more convincing. Affleck only scratched the surface of the dramatic possibilities with Joe Coughlin whereas actors such as Michael Fassbender, Tom Hardy or even the rumoured Leonardo DiCaprio might have been a better fit. Complete with an attempt at an Irish-American twang, Affleck does a good gangster but for a film of this calibre and potential, I needed a great lead gangster. He manages to shine during business discussions particularly with Chris Cooper's Sheriff (who is very well cast) but with love interests or mob bosses, Affleck was fairly one-note. On the other hand, Live By Night also serves as a platform for other actors and actresses to dominate. One of those dominators is Elle Fanning in a supporting role as a girl who after reforming from addiction, becomes a preacher who serves as trouble for Joe's casino business. Proving herself to be the better Fanning sister, Elle is very commanding and convincing as a troubled youngster who lost her way. The scenes in which she preaches the gospel and enters debates with Joe is well written but fantastically acted by Fanning.
Brendan Gleeson also makes a small appearance as Joe's father, a police chief. Gleeson is great as always but both he and Elle Fanning's character suffer from the same problem. For some irritating reason, they're hardly featured. They each have a specific reason for their inclusion but their back stories and involvement in the story was so compelling and interesting but then they hardly feature. I couldn't help but feel like Live By Night focused on the wrong characters. We hardly spend any time with the characters we want to know more about and focus too much on the characters we don't care enough for. Sienna Miller stars as one of the two love interests for Coughlin and sadly, she was the one that shared the least amount of chemistry with Affleck. Their scenes together weren't terrible but considering the first act relies on their relationship, the spark was nonexistent. Miller's Irish accent was very good though. Who Affleck did share reasonable chemistry with was Zoe Saldana. Whenever she is onscreen, she fascinates me with her compelling reasons for involving herself with Joe's misdeeds but also her lucrative history. The unfortunate thing is that she too isn't given enough time to be fleshed out so Saldana suffers with a character with brilliant potential but rushed through. The only other character of real note is played by Matthew Maher whose character is significant for reasons I'll discuss later in the review. Basically, his character is clearly meant to be unlikeable and disgusting but we could understand that just from the description of him. I obviously don't know whether this was Affleck's creative decision or Maher's own personal spin on the character but he came across like a cartoon. His over-the-top nature didn't mix well with the seriousness that Live By Night had kept until then and his performance really started to annoy me but not in the way it was meant to.
FACT: Leonardo DiCaprio was considered for the lead role, but decided to produce this film instead.
Despite a collection of mostly mediocre performances, with a few great ones, Live By Night is shot very well. Even though it isn't his best work, this hasn't made me dislike Ben Affleck as a director because he clearly knows how to make a beautiful looking movie. From the glitz and the glamour in Boston to the scenic and stunning rivers in Florida and New Orleans, the cinematography is by far the strongest aspect of this film. The weakest part of this film is the pace. It's too slow. The first act, apart from a car chase, is unfathomably boring. It took me a long time to begin to care about this film because the start lacks any entertainment value. In actual fact, the opening is the definition of a generic gangster's beginning. The second act picks up a little because we see businesses begin and corrupt dealings but at the same time, the pace is still lacking. When we reach the third and final act and guns start firing and people start dying, I was eventually woken but even then there was still no gripping excitement. Instead of the kick up the arse, the third act felt more like a poke. There's also a lengthy secondary plot involving the KKK and the conflict Joe has with them which is where Matthew Maher arrives. Ultimately, the entire KKK story could have been cut because there was no point to it. It wasted about twenty minutes that didn't serve much of a purpose to the overall plot when characters that were aching to be further developed were left in the dark. The removal of those scenes would have also helped the film with its catastrophic pacing issues and flow a lot better. Live By Night isn't all doom and gloom though as the depiction of the brutality a gangster lives with was very impressive and as violent as I had hoped. I'm not sadistic or anything but I love my gangster films with heaps of disturbing violence and Live By Night is full of graphic shots to the head, shots to the chest and slit throats. Gangsters weren't cheerful guys so I found the extreme violence presented here very accurate.
No director can ever have a perfect career and Affleck is no exception. Whilst there is nothing inherently awful about Live By Night, it does suffer from many problems that bring the quality of the film down exponentially. For a cast of this talent, only a few of them truly give 100% whilst others (particularly Affleck) were not entirely right for the role. I can only hope that when directing the Batman movie, Affleck ditches his inconsistent pacing issues from this but still retains his ability to make his films look stunning.
My Verdict: 6/10
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