Too many reviews of late have been prefaced by noting that the film marks the final performance of a talent prematurely snatched from us, and The Drop is that very movie for the brilliant James Gandolfini.
While Enough Said was an indelible reminder of his lighter side, this superior genre flick finds him silently moving through the gears, passing the baton to Tom Hardy, an actor with a similarly intimidating presence bubbling beneath a hulking great surface.
It’s a fitting epitaph, as well as being one of a number of recent adult films (Gone Girl, A Most Wanted Man) released among a slew of movies cynically aimed at particular demographics by committee.
The establishment of the title is a bar formerly owned by Cousin Marv (Gandolfini), a one-time power player on the Brooklyn streets who relinquished ownership when Chechen crime lords moved into the neighbourhood.
A “drop” is a place where off-the-books financial transactions of the City happen; a man will walk in with a brown envelope wrapped in newspaper, it'll be handed to the barkeep, Bob (Hardy), and deposited in a safe until it’s time to move the stash on.
As with all crime capers, things don’t run smoothly, and the bar is soon held up for $5,000, an amount that the Chechens hold Marv and Bob responsible for, giving them an ultimatum to return the cash or face the consequences.
Bob isn’t just having vocational problems, though. Having discovered an abandoned puppy he decides to take it in with the help of Nadia (Noomi Rapace), a mysteriously scarred waitress with whom he forms a tentative friendship.
Both the dog and the girl appear to have dangerous links to a local hoodlum (Mattias Schoenaerts–Rust and Bone), and the entire tangled web will contrive to link together during one crazy Superbowl Sunday.
As you can ascertain from that synopsis, there is nothing we haven’t seen before from Dennis Lehane’s screenplay. It’s executed as intelligent, brilliantly acted storytelling, so you soon forgive any familiarity.
Hardy has brooded as Bronson, Bane, and the monosyllabic grunter of Warrior, excelling at portraying a corked explosiveness beneath the softly spoken exterior. While that’s the case here, his Bob is a different beast. Think Gosling in Drive but having swallowed a few more pages of the dictionary: insular, naive, unintentionally funny, and despite a few questionable moral decisions, utterly likeable. He’s captivating to watch because you’re unsure of what he’s about to do or have done to him. That said, credit for Hardy’s performance must be shared with the most adorable on-screen dog since Marley.
Gandolfini keeps his cards close to his chest in terms of performance and character. It’s a subdued turn of a man struggling to accept his place in a new multi-cultural world, and the late actor’s shuffling, hunched mannerisms convey this resignation and perfectly complement the narrative.
Noomi Rapace promises much with her spiky, eccentric introduction but soon becomes little more than a pawn for the men in this man’s world to fight over.
So it’s down to Mattias Schoenaerts to steal the movie with another screen-filling role as the unhinged gangster, his Belgian accent completely smothered by a near perfect Brooklyn drawl.
As an ensemble they’re superb, but the main problem with The Drop is that it’s never close to being the sum of its parts. The story is rather perfunctory, with the misplaced mob money plot being done to death, and even though there are a couple of decent final reel dramatic beats, you can’t help but feel underwhelmed because we’re treading well-worn ground: duplicity, Eastern European gangsters, and a boiling point protagonist.
It’s well scripted Scorsese-lite, which is in itself a compliment.
Directed with a steady hand and viewed through a drab filter which underlines the depressing working class void where our characters are trapped, The Drop might lack narrative complexity, but it’s the exercise in slow-burn character study that makes it stand out.
‘The Drop’
Director: Michaël R. Roskam
Starring: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini
Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes
Release date: Sept. 12 (USA)
3 stars out of 5
Follow Matthew Rodgers on Twitter: @MainstreamMatt
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