The mistake that is Live by Night

Synopsys: Ben Affleck comes back from WWI and doesn't want to take orders. Thus, he becomes an independent outlaw. He gets distracted by a dangerous love and after some troubles changes his life: now he can take orders again! That guy? That was the old Ben Affleck! So there is another movie about him being a gangster with other 4 or 5 subplots that unravel in a short time and make the movie incredibly long.

This time not only I want to remain spoiler-free, but also to be more didactic than usual. The movie, as you guess, didn't impress me one bit: too many storylines, too many themes, and the final result looks like a TV series of 10 hours smashed inside a 2 hours-long film. It is very easy to lose track of what is going on but it is not a big deal: at some point the movie reboots itself and you can start looking at something similar.

Allow me to be didascalic for a moment. A movie, a story, usually obeys to the following toy model:

1. Enter the characters
2. They want something
3. Something else is stopping them
4. Things are very difficult now
5. A break thru, the solution to the problem
6. It works, maybe not at the first attempt, but surely at the second one (either in a good or bad way)
7. Conclusion (either happy or sad)

Or, to put it in a more graphical way, it generally looks like that

I can point out many problems with this movie but, wrapped into great action sequences and convincing acting, the core of them is that its structure looks like this one

To see how confusing it is, here how the white noise looks like

In other words, there are 5 or 6 stories and some of them may or may not please you, but their presence and development are crushed by a narration the existence of which is a mistake. Every story touches a theme and they are all interesting, but overshadowed by the relentless chase of a new event to display on the screen. The result is that nothing is interesting, everything is saturated, and the movie feels 3 hours long.

The most surprising thing was not the twist: you see it coming literally a hundred minutes in advance. The most surprising thing is that I appreciated Ben Affleck more as an actor than as a director when it is usually the opposite. 

And ain't because he became suddenly a better actor.