The Drop review

                Though displaying nothing new or especially unique, Michael Roskam’s street-crime potboiler “The Drop” is a totally well-oiled entertainment mechanism that uses its deliberate run-time to reinforce story and shape character relationships in a way that’s refreshingly confident.  In an early-fall season that's excruciatingly barren of acceptable mainstream releases, the fact that I can muster-up a bar-level positive review for this flick feels like a heavy-load lifted from my shoulders, but, with that said, I don’t want to undersell just how exciting and occasionally inspired this little bit of gangster-grit can be.  Roskam’s command of performances and ability to properly stimulate story beats shouldn’t to be overlooked just because so much of what we see here is so familiar, and the way the plot, little by little, pieces itself together, reversing our assumptions about the characters and the meaning of their interactions, is certainly worthy of more than consolation praise.  

                Tom Hardy and the late James Gandolfini star as Bob and Marv, two cousins who run a Brooklyn dive-bar that’s used by the Czech mafia as a front illegal transactions and occasional money drops.  Older cousin Marv, who used to own the bar officially, is bitter about his property becoming a babysitting gig for a dangerous outside force. Younger cousin Bob is trying to live his complicated life one day at a time when he finds an abused puppy outside of the house of a formerly abused girl named Nadia (Noomi Repace), leading the two strangers to nurse the animal back to health, splitting visitation days between their increasingly romantic outings. All seems well until Bob and Marv are robbed by petty thieves, prompting upper management to put the pressure on, and a sleazy ex-boyfriend of Nadia claims ownership of the battered puppy/girl, putting pressure on Bob to go into hoodlum white-knight mode. 

                The subtle brilliance of this two pronged plot structure is the way screenwriter Denis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island) ties the strands together in believably incidental ways.  The movie examines the meaning of relationships and the role each participant plays in keeping familial loyalty a priority, then questions just how thin and fragile the membrane between allegiance and betrayal really is. Hardy and Gandolfini are truly exceptional here as the tense arc of their partnership plays out like a back-alley Greek tragedy. Gandolfini especially—in what was probably his last gig before dying of a heart-attack—carries the weight of entire world in his face, and even when his character acts out in a seemingly cold-hearted fashion, the guilt and confliction in his mannerisms offsets the genre clichés within the scenes they occupy. Repace, on the other hand, isn’t terrible but she struggles to deliver her dialogue in a comfortable regional accent, often warbling back into her Swedish inflection. Unfortunately, though never threatening the movie's overall quality, her performance is dwarfed in the many scenes she shares with both Tom Hardy and Matthias Schoenaerts, who plays her pathetic earwig of an ex.

                “The Drop” takes its time building up and laying the path for a conclusion that really informs the rest of the film; not a twist per-se, but a crescendo that links the units together under a unifying thematic purpose. Because of this, the majority of the film feels a little disconnected, casual and sometimes aloof, but once you get to the point where you can see the culmination of events, the film's pays off is emotionally satisfying. In all, though the movie is generically easy to categorize, it’s the quality of direction, the clever scripting, and the power of the performances that stick with you.

Grade: B

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2014