Here I thought that this was going to just be a rather straight forward but entertaining gangster drama set in the prohibition era. To my surprise, it goes to ambitious heights of also tackling strong subject matters such as racism and religion, among many others. What a mistake that was. I get that those plot points where also in the novel by Dennis Lehane that this film is an adaptation of, but it turns out that there are way too many stories here that's trying to cram itself into a two hours movie format.
Despite some of the positive things I could say about it, like the high production values, the gorgeous cinematography, the locations, the action set pieces, some legitimately great scenes that can be found here and there, Chris Messina as Dion Bartolo, Elle Fanning as Loretta Figgis, generally all the talent on screen, despite all that I unfortunately have to say that the overall narrative itself holds this back from being a good film. I'll go ahead and toss this argument in here, but the whole story probably would have played better as a TV series.
I suppose I should place the blame on Director, Actor, Screen-writer Ben Affleck for not being able to pull this off, but there's something else that I need to blame more. The lead character that he plays, Joe Coughlin. What an insufferable and uninspired character. His tragic criminal turned gang leader with a heart of gold, is like the embodiment of a humble-brag, and the perfect trigger to make people roll their eyes. Just like the overall movie, there's clearly am ambitiousness to make Coughlin be this anti-hero for the masses, but all it did was make me like the whole film even less.
loveditenjoyedititsokay IT'S MEH itsterrible
