Live by Night

Ben Affleck's Live by Night could have been could have been could have been.

It champions multicultural reflexivity as opposed to rigid dictations as its extremely honourable Irish gangster hero Joe Coughlin (Affleck) makes the right moves to sanctify in sacrifice.

Teamwork is essentially adorned with crucial combative exteriorized comeuppances as partner Dion Bartolo (Chris Messina) provides extrajudicial reckoning.

Idyllic forbidden rapturous love bountifully blossoms in different contexts while Joe comes to terms with his unheralded prestige.

A real-world high-level inevitability permeates each action but isn't enough to prevent thought from rationally entreating.

From using honest North American know-how to level-out the playing field.

There's just one problem.

It's too perfect.

All of its calculations and conversations are just plain-old too noble, too wonderful, everything works out too well, it's far too comfortable for a gangster film.

Some loose ends, please.

Instead of feeling worried or anxious or fearful or nervous I just felt complacent, there's no suspense, it was like I was watching a bright mathematician prove a trigonometric identity, or checking out reruns of a favourite dark family friendly show.

Live by Night explains why the term hardboiled was applied to books by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, or indirectly to films by John Huston or Howard Hawks.

Without the hardboiled aspect, you wind up with Live by Night.

Which I may have loved in my youth.

But couldn't get into mid-life.