In his new directorial effort, Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, a World War I vet who’s returned to the crime-ridden streets of Boston where his father (Brendan Gleeson) is a police captain. He soon gets into trouble with the Irish mob boss, whose girlfriend Emma (Sienna Miller) Joe has been seeing on the sly, knowing full well how dangerous that is. When the city’s Italian crime chief realises this, he holds the info over Joe to force him to help with his businesses down in Florida. As you can imagine, that’s a lot of characters to keep track of, especially when you consider that the movie’s opening sets up a bunch of plotlines that are mostly ignored until close to the finale. Without having read Lehane’s novel, it’s hard to know whether he found a smoother way of introducing so many characters in such a short amount of time, but just as you’re adjusting to what’s happening in Boston, everything shifts forward in time and location. For a movie where so much occurs in the first 30 minutes, the pace still tends to drag and, at times, is as slow as hell. A lot of these problems can be attributed to Affleck’s screenplay, that never quite finds the right tone, as well a performance from him as an actor that pulls the rest of his cast down. Affleck has improved his visual sense as a director, which at times helps to alleviate some of the film’s pacing issues, but a bank robbery that leads to a high-speed car chase only breaks up the monotony for so long. Watching Live By Night, it’s hard not to think that the Coens did this sort of thing much better with Miller’s Crossing, and it was too big a gamble for Affleck to think he could make a gangster flick half as memorable. The whole thing ends up being a grim affair that leaves you coming out the other side wondering what the point of any of it was.