Watch the trailer for Ben Affleck’s Live by Night

Following the much maligned Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Ben Affleck is back behind the camera for the fourth time with gangster picture Live by Night

Ben Affleck’s wounds have healed since his best Oscar snub for Argo back in 2013 and the Gone Girl star is back in the director's chair with gangster movie Live by Night. The trailer landed last night and suggests a typically slick number from the director of The Town and Gone Baby Gone.

Based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane (who also wrote the source text for Gone Baby Gone), the film follows Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck), the son of a Boston police captain who finds himself falling head first into a life of organised crime following the Great War. Or, as Coughlin puts it in the trailer’s heavy-handed voiceover: “I signed up to fight in the war. I went away a soldier. I came home an outlaw.”

Live by Night certainly looks fantastic: the period costumes are gorgeous and Robert Richardson’s cinematography is lush. And judging from the two-minute promo, it also seems to be full of cliches, from the gangster molls to the vicious kingpin to the age-old trope of an ostensibly good man getting pulled into the underworld and finding the only way out is through violence. “I realised to be free in this life,” says Coughlin in voiceover at the trailer's bloody and bombastic conclusion, “breaking rules meant nothing. You had to be strong enough to make your own.”

The dialogue may be ripe, but you can’t argue with the cast. As well as Affleck, there’s Sienna Miller, Elle Fanning, Zoe Saldana, Brendan Gleeson and Chris Cooper – we’d watch that movie.

Watch the trailer in the player above, then let us know what you think in the comments below.