Ben Affleck takes his shot at delivering a sweeping mobster epic in the vein of The Godfather II, but loses his way in a meandering narrative that’s unsure of what story its actually trying to tell.

On the surface, Live By Night is a gorgeous film. From its gorgeous period costumes, to its versions of 1920’s Boston, Evangelical Southern tent revivals, and Prohibition-era rum-runners in a Cuba-inspired Florida; Live By Night sucks you into thinking you’re going to see a marriage between a Howard Hawks Scarface with the flavor of Coppola’s The Godfather Part 2 in a fully realized world.

Sadly, that’s not really the case at all.

Affleck, who also wrote and directed the film, plays Joe Coughlin, a World War I veteran who returns home to his native Boston and decides to become an “outlaw,” robbing banks and sticking up other criminals with his crew by night for money and thrills. Between his thrill-seeking lifestyle, he spends most of his time shacked up with his “inside man,” an Irish gun moll named Emma Gould (Sienna Miller). Coughlin starts to fall for Emma, which becomes problematic since she is the mistress of Albert White; an Irish mob kingpin and rum-runner. Coughlin and Emma’s relationship ends up becoming known to Maso Pescatore, White’s Italian mob rival who orders Coughlin to kill White to save his moll; but Coughlin refuses, saying he’s an outlaw and he won’t be tied to the mob. Regardless, the affair becomes known and Coughlin is beaten nearly to death and imprisoned. Years pass and Coughlin makes his peace with Maso; he joins his mob for a chance to get his revenge on White in Florida and takeover the rum-running in that territory.

If the film continued on this trajectory, it might have worked much better than the end product does. Live By Night largely struggles because its not sure what story it wants to tell. In Florida, Coughlin has struggles against the Ku Klux Klan; in particular, RD Pruitt (Matthew Maher), a protected son of the local chief of police (Chris Cooper) afflicted with a cleft-palette. Maher’s portrayal of RD would feel more at home in a Corn Brothers film as does most of Affleck’s performance as Coughlin. He keeps trying to smooth issues out in the film over without using violence to the point where his character comes off as milquetoast. At one point, Affleck’S Coughlin gives a searing indictment of racism towards landed gentry in Florida who won’t approve his massive casino plan. The speech seems totally out of place; especially in the South removed a couple of generations from slavery. Along the way, Coughlin struggles with mob treachery, the changing socio-political landscape with Prohibition ending, winning over the support of the local Cubans who smuggles Molasses into Florida, as well as a hamfisted love story with Zoe Saldana’s Graciella, and finally Elle Fanning’s Loretta Figgis. Figgis is a former heroin addict that Coughlin rescues from a sex ring in Los Angeles who becomes an Aimee Semple McPherson-like preacher encouraging people to end Coughlin’s would-be casino. It just provides another odd narrative branch in the film; one that comes to an ultimately unsatisfying end. The film clocks in at two hours and feels like a unyielding and sprawling mess, with a bizarre resolution to Coughlin’s story that feels, in many ways, unearned, and only serves to try and tie a ribbon between this uneven films disparate elements.

In many ways, Live By Night feels like a story that would be better off in the wheelhouse of directors like the Coen Brothers who regularly juggle multiple disparate plot elements with alternating quirky and serious elements. The film struggles in establishing a strong narrative arc for Coughlin and the pacing throughout the film suffers as a result. Despite invoking films like Scarface and The Godfather II; Live by Night doesn’t succeed in being a gangster epic in either mold. At best, its a character study with rich set dressing that it fails to full to take advantage of in its telling.