The Drop Review

A couple of years ago I reluctantly reviewed Bullhead, a Flemish-language film about abuses within the rural Belgian meat trade. I was surprised with what I saw, however. It was a nauseatingly brutal, engaging film, so violent in one part that I thought I was going to be sick. The director, Michael R. Roskam, must have impressed higher forces than me, because he was subsequently offered a big-hitting Hollywood crime drama with two huge stars. The result is The Drop, a New York underworld tale of money and murder.

The location is Brooklyn, in a run-down neighbourhood once run by Cousin Marv. The hulking bruiser of an American is played by James Gandolfini, of Sopranos fame, in what was his final film before a fatal heart attack. All the brooding, bastard thuggery that Gandolfini became so well known for is present in Marv. A decade earlier, some Chechen chaps muscled in, Marv ‘blinked first’, and the Eastern gangsters took over. Now he has to content himself with running a bar he once owned (originally called Cousin Marv’s), a location for criminals to store and collect their dirty money.

Tom Hardy is Bob Saginowski, a taciturn relative of Marv’s who tends the bar and keeps out of trouble. However, trouble comes to him in two ways: first, when he finds an injured dog in a bin and forms a relationship with the owner of the bin, Nadia (Noomi Rapace). Her ex-boyfriend (played by Matthias Shoenaerts, start of Bullhead) is a lunatic with a violent past who then stalks and intimidates Bob. Second, the bar is held up by a couple of small time thugs, and the Chechens want their money back. The police also become interested. The various happenings threaten to take Bob down, but is there more to him than meets the eye?

As New York based gangster films are want to do, religious motifs pop up time and again. Bob and the detective investigating the shady goings on are both devotees of the local Catholic church. So enters the redemption theme. In the face of unrelenting criminality, Bob is obviously trying to do some good. His care for the dog allows him to put his religious sentiments into practice, for until now he did not even take communion.

It is also a film rampant in all-American masculinity - just look at the three top-billed actors and their reputations. It seems as if the gangster genre really is an update of the Western, and Hardy is every bit The Man With No Name.

The Drop stems from a short story by one Dennis Lehane, who then scripted the film. I can see how the story would work well in novella form or even as a brief play – it has the brief, intimate examination of a section of life that is perhaps too cosy for a big blockbuster. Considering the names at the top of the billing, the story isn’t as complex as presented. Pairing of actors to provide an unyielding masculinity to the gritty, Brooklyn scene.