O, Fortuna! Your capricious wheel of fate brings us mortals to greatest highs and most miserable lows as we rotate, ever onward, through the spinning machinations of time! And none among us has been raised by generous fortune to loftier highs, then brought to cruelest lows, than that mighty chin among men, the Batman-who-would-be-king, Ben Affleck.
Affleck the Elder’s career carves the insistent, repetitive arc of a pendulum, with the trough accompanying some of the most irredeemable garbage cinema has ever seen. And yet, he ascends—from Gigli to Argo, from Jersey Girl to Gone Girl. We are bearing witness to the uneasy middle period of the Ben Affleck Cycle, on the heels of the brain-bludgeoning Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and whatever the fuck The Accountant was. It is, perhaps, not the most propitious time for Affleck to unveil a sprawling gangster epic—a work in a genre that, in the right hands, can be transcendent, and in the wrong hands, hackneyed and derivative.
Live by Night suggests, however, that Affleck may be on one of his many upswings.