For its first fifteen minutes, The Drop looks, sounds, and feels like a retread of every standard issue NYC-based crime thriller: it’s dourly drawn, frank in tone, and peppered with prototypically New Yawk accents. But all of the film’s hoary cliches are backed up by pedigree, which just goes to show how valuable pedigree can be in well-worn territory. It’s directed by Michaël R. Roskam, the Belgian filmmaker responsible for 2011’s excellent Bullhead. It’s written by Boston-based novelist, Dennis Lehane, a veteran peddler of gritty street-level morality tales. And it stars Tom Hardy, coming off an impressive performance in April’s Locke.
It also happens to feature the final performance of the late James Gandolfini, but frankly, Gandolfini’s presence in the film may be its least remarkable quality. Not that anybody should dismiss Tony Soprano’s last bow, mind, but he is here, in essence, to play James Gandolfini. If The Drop is founded on genre staples, its most rote aspect is his dialogue, which simply recycles his Sopranos tough guy bravado. He makes it work, as he did throughout his career, but the movie doesn’t bother reaching far to sculpt his character.
Would his rumblings sound any better coming from someone else? Probably not. That’s Gandolfini’s gift: he had a schtick, but it never felt like schtick. In The Drop, that schtick layers his character, Marv, with a deep-rooted melancholy that’s compelling. Marv used to be his own man, a bar owner with a reputation to be feared in his Brooklyn neighborhood. But that’s all past tense. In the present, he owns the bar in name only following a buyout with local Chechen heavies, who now use the establishment as a “drop bar” for filtering illicit funds. Once the master of his destiny, now a cog in the mob machine of a culture he doesn’t seem to understand. We feel bad for Marv in spite of his brute ignorance. Nonetheless, he’s not the star. He’s almost the backdrop.
No, The Drop’s true person of interest is Hardy, playing Marv’s sadsack cousin and business partner, Bob. The film revolves around a simple matter of robbery, committed late one night by a couple of masked punks; bereft of their nightly score, Marv and Bob have to come up with the purloined dough to mollify their boss (Michael Aronov, most recently seen playing Anton Baklanov in The Americans). We don’t need the promise of brutal violence to know that the Chechen coterie is bad news, but we get it, and so Marv and Bob find their work cut out for them.
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