“I went away a soldier. I came home an outlaw.” A chilling message from Ben Affleck in the first teaser for his prohibition-era set crime thriller Live by Night. Affleck pulls triple duty as writer, director and star in this adaptation of the best-selling Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) novel, which is actually the second in a trilogy; Live by Night (released in 2012) is bookended by The Given Day (2008) and World Gone By (2015).
As his directorial follow-up to Best Picture winner Argo, Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, the son of a police captain who gets involved with organized crime in Boston. Funneling booze to underground speakeasies comes at a price when he breaks one of the cardinal rules among criminals: don’t cross the boss when it comes to money and his favorite moll. Things go south (literally) as Joe takes off to Tampa where he works his way up the rum-running underworld.
Set to arrive January 13, 2017, the timing has me a little worried. January is a month usually reserved for studios either pushing its prestige releases after limited Christmastime engagements or dumping films with little support. But this teaser has me optimistic. The roaring ’20s. Prohibition. Bullets fly. Bodies fall. Gunfights and knifings.
Have a look.
Ben Affleck has assembled quite a cast with Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Messina, Zoe Saldana, Sienna Miller, and Chris Cooper on board. The film is lensed by the great cinematographer Robert Richardson (who has worked with the likes of Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino) and is scored by Harry Gregson-Williams, who also did Affleck’s debut feature Gone Baby Gone, which is also based on a Dennis Lehane novel.
