If I Did It (Ben Affleck Version)

On "Deep Water."

Ben Affleck said she can play in your face but not in mine. Photo: Screenshot.

Deep Water, the first Adrian Lyne offering in twenty years, is like the inverse Gone Girl; It’s O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It (Ben’s Version). “When I think of my wife, I always think of the back of her head,” Affleck, as Nick Dunne, said in the David Fincher movie. “I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brain, trying to get answers.” Vic Van Allen (Ben Affleck), the sweetly stay-at-home, weapons of mass destruction-designing (???) dad, doesn’t need to unspool any brains to get to the bottom of anything. He’s the “I love my curvy wife” guy, but it’s “I love my horny wife.” He just hates her boyfriends.

Vic all but rolls his eyes at the Spicoli-looking guy he watches Melinda (Ana de Armas) kissing at a party. He grumbles at the tall Euphoria boy (no I can’t remember his name and don’t feel like Googling) sitting down at the piano like he’s Alicia Keys, giving Melinda piano lessons. He stews over another man we don’t meet, who goes missing shortly before the events of the movie begin. Vic coolly interrogates Finn Wittrock, professional punchable face, when it’s clear he wants to cook Vic’s pet snails and then run away with Vic’s wife. Affleck plays Vic as more curiously menacing where Nick was selfish and bumbling; Ana de Armas flirts and fights, and sometimes the flirting is her fighting.

In the time between Unfaithful and Deep Water, the medium, let’s say, hit a wall.