The Drop

The Drop (2014)

A solid, somewhat slow but never tedious look inside some small time crooks who own a bar in the City. This one is a drop for payments in a booking racket, and the bar owner (James Gandolfini) sort of goes along because he has no choice. The bartender (Tom Hardy) is far more ambiguous, and he makes the movie click. Add Noomi Rapace whose small role fills in a big gap rather well and you have the core of the cast, all excellent.

There is no attempt at the grandiose here, despite all the history and slightly exaggerated characters involved (mostly bad ones). And that's the beauty of the movie, which manages not just realism but a welcome tenderness amidst all the darkness and bad intentions. The one bright spot is, tragically, Gandolfini, who manages to be really funny even as he about to do terrible things. Hardy is just the opposite, showing a huge heart with utter sobriety even as he, too, is going to do terrible things.

Whether this quite rises above the many movies that dive into this kind of world I don't know, but I thoroughly enjoyed it even when it seemed to get slow. It doesn't plod, but it has no urgency, either. There are some clichés that might have been avoided (the attitude of the bad guys) and some violence that seemed a bit in your face, but it balances out, too. Rapace is not given enough to do—this is a man's movie, another one —but she is tough and smart in necessary ways.

Well filmed, smartly done, I'd give this a look.