The Drop **** (2014, Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini) – Movie Review

Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini are both excellent in a well shot, tense and atmospheric character-driven thriller. There’s a lot of really good work on show, with the dialogue, visuals, lowlife atmosphere and performances very striking, but in the end it doesn’t amount to a huge hill of beans.

Tom Hardy does an impression of Mumbling Marlon Brando as lonely Brooklyn bartender Bob Saginowski, who finds himself at the centre of a robbery gone awry and embroiled in an investigation, in this first screenplay by Dennis Lehane, based on his short story Animal Rescue.

Lehane is the writer of the source novels for Mystic River (2003), Gone Baby Gone (2007) and Shutter Island (2010), so you’ll kind of know what to expect in the way of tone and style, that is dark, gritty and brooding.

Hardy is perfectly good, but you wonder why an American wasn’t hired for the part, and then you wonder if he wouldn’t have been better. However, undeniably better is James Gandolfini in his final role before his of a heart attack on June 19 2013 at the age 51. Gandolfini plays Bob’s shifty, sweaty employer and cousin Marv, and very well too. It’s an ideal part for him and he’s ideal in it.

He fits into the seedy, corrupt bar setting perfectly, in a way that Hardy doesn’t. Hardy has to work hard to act his way through The Drop. The effort shows a bit. Gandolfini inhabits the movie like a bit of the scenery. Whatever acting he’s doing doesn’t show as acting at all. He’s just there. An essential ingredient. Without him the film would be very little to write home about. Not a bad film, but an entirely unremarkable one. Just a well-written TV drama.

The Drop’ is that the bar is a dropping off place for funnelling dirty cash to local gangsters. But then the bar is robbed, apparently by small time crooks.[Spoiler alert] There’s no honour among thieves, of course, and it looks like someone might have had their hand in the till. That someone is Marv, of course, the former owner of the bar now trying to rip off his ruthless Chechen gangster employers. The crime bosses are very angry, really want their money back and of course force Bob and Marv to find out who robbed the bar.

Noomi Rapace makes little impression in a cypher of a token female role as Nadia, a scarred Russian waitress Bob starts a relationship with after he rescues a wounded pitbull puppy. But Matthias Schoenaerts impresses in an eye-catching part as a low-grade thug called Eric Deeds. Schoenaerts also starred in director Michaël R. Roskam‘s 2011 crime drama Bullhead. John Ortiz is the other standout as Detective Torres, who is investigating the robbery.

The film is not particularly thin or lightweight, but it does feel like a short story, and it’s an unlikely one with a [Spoiler alert] final twist that will come as no surprise to thriller buffs but is entertainingly done in a satisfying conclusion.

Indeed, I’d say the whole film is satisfying without being particularly special or memorable. It’s a good genre crime drama, not a great one. And, with its strong dialogue and performances, that’s good enough this time.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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Kiss me, Hardy!