Live by Night

I must say, Ben Affleck disappointed me in this film. Besides showing off his acting chops, which I don't enjoy much, he's just too macho here, and you don't really believe his emotions, so story-wise, it's quite boring, and also predictable. It jumps from topic to topic, from scene to scene, to keep from being boring. And yet it's boring. (07/04/2017)

If I was surrounded by Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana and Elle Fanning, I would also feel like this is heaven, right here, we’re in it now. Ben Affleck as a director seems more interested in the charms of beautiful women than in the characters of the gangsters themselves. The female characters are portrayed in such a gentlemanly manner that you’ll forgive him all the rest. By which I mean the attempt to create an ambitious retro drama that bit off more than it could chew in terms of storytelling. Less would have been more, as evidenced by, for example, Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition, which had fewer characters but a clear goal, which it pursued with precision and self-assurance. In Live by Night, Affleck seems to lose both of those attributes on occasions and the resulting movie is fun and pleasant to watch, but in comparison with the director’s perfect Argo, it seems more like a failure. (16/01/2017)

Somewhere in there is a good film. Somewhere in the background, somewhere in the editing room. It's an hour longer, looks just as good and beautiful as what we got in the cinema, but besides those nice visuals, there are also functioning relationships between the characters and it has a story that doesn't rush anywhere and you can enjoy and have fun with it. Unfortunately, we got in the cinema evidently suffers from being brutally cut. Live by Night senselessly rushes forward, and instead of a modern gangster saga, we have twenty-minute episodes about dealing with mafia competition in Florida, then with the Ku Klux Klan, then with religious fanatics, and then it all ends. I felt like someone had played me a six-hour miniseries cut down to feature length, and I wasn't thrilled about it. (15/05/2017)

It was supposed to be a five-part miniseries or a three-hour film; then, it would benefit from the huge number of themes and great supporting characters. At the same time, the transformation of Affleck from a straight Boston scrounger to a mafia hood might not sound so unconvincing (at one point he assures us that he does not want to have anything to do with the world of organized crime; but after a moment he suddenly jumps into the position of a menacing boss). But when I think about the overload of storytelling, Live by Night is a fun, stimulating and time-relevant capture of a fragment from the history of the American South, which reflects a number of essential motifs. Solid work with period scenery, a good atmosphere, brisk action and a very fun side storyline and character - the main storyline needs more care and detail, but even so, I went along with the protagonist the entire time without any problems. The scene with KKK in a cigar factory is very, very relieving [75%]. (12/01/2017)

Everything I feared became a reality. You want a gritty gangster revenge flick, but instead you wait with fear in your eyes for a dressed-up Gatsby to pop around the corner in some lavish camera swoop. That's how "beautiful" Live By Night is, unfortunately, in this case. It does have a flair for pictorial composition, it’s well-acted with few exceptions, with some great roles given damn little space (Gleeson, Cooper). Unfortunately, thematically, it's a film that's not supposed to be so fancy, especially when right at the beginning you get a lively action set-piece like in Public Enemies. It is, after all, a gritty story from a harsh and unforgiving time, and not a poster-boy reminiscence of the golden 1930s. And that's exactly the point where Affleck screwed up, hand in hand with the script. He shows the twenties with poetics, in a haze of nostalgia that doesn’t fit. It called for shady businesses, down-to-earth characters, period hits and dirty streets, exactly how we like it in other films. Still, Affleck has a talent for directing and he can act, but hopefully, he will no longer write scripts. (14/01/2017)