After Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, it’s refreshing to see Ben Affleck returning to some lighter fare. In Live By Night, he plays Joe Coughlin, a brutal bootlegger turned notorious gangster in Prohibition-era America despite the influence of his Boston police captain father (Brendan Gleeson). This trailer is essentially two minutes of gunfire, explosions, old timey cars, and natty clothes. It’s hard to tell from what we see here how this might rise above the quality of a feature length episode of Boardwalk Empire. But because he’s not wearing a superhero costume in any of it, we should give probably give Affleck the benefit of the doubt.
This marks Affleck’s fourth directing effort and his second time going for the actor-writer-director triple crown (after The Town). The filmmaker wrote the screenplay himself, based on the 2012 crime novel by Dennis Lehane (whose novel Gone Baby Gone was the first film Affleck adapted for the screen and directed). Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana, Chris Messina, Elle Fanning, and Chris Cooper are all part of the supporting cast, probably because it would have been too time-consuming for Affleck to play those parts himself.
Live By Night will descend upon theaters everywhere on January 13.