"The Drop"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

A “drop bar” is a bar where criminals conveniently drop off cash from their criminal activities. Each night there is a different drop bar in Brooklyn, N.Y. People come in, drop of their packages, and then slink off unnoticed. Then the boss comes in and gets all the cash.

“Cousin Marv’s” is one such bar. The owner is, appropriately enough, Cousin Marv (James Gandolfini). Marv and his cousin, Bob (Tom Hardy), run the bar and manage all the cash transactions. Marv is the shrewd ringleader. Or so it seems. Bob is the meek (and maybe a little slow) bartender who does Marv’s bidding. Or so it seems.

The usual routine is broken up one night when burglars rob Cousin Marv’s. This would suck pretty much no matter what. But it really sucks for Marv and Bob, since the mob bosses still want their cash. This thread fizzles out pretty quickly, though. What seems to be important is just that we get a sense of how ruthless and unforgiving (and predictably stereotypical) the mob bosses are. They don’t care what happened. They just want their money.

Even more tangential than the robbery is a peculiar little romance. One night when Bob is walking home he hears something jostling around inside a trashcan in someone’s front yard. He investigates, and finds a beaten, bloodied puppy dog. Nadia (Noomi Rapace), who lives at this house, hears the commotion and comes out to see what is going on. She has no idea about the dog—she did not put it there and does not know who did. But she is just as concerned about it as Bob. So they form a bond over the dog.

What happens next? Well, there are some scenes where more robberies are planned. Then some more of Bob, Nadia, and their puppy. Then more sociopathic mobsters. More planning. More puppy. More mobsters. At some point a lunatic of a jealous ex-boyfriend/ex-dog owner shows up and mixes things up. Then more planning. More puppy. More mobsters. And so on.

“The Drop” is a poorly sewn together Frankenstein of a movie—with one dangling, comical arm longer than the other, ears where there should be eyes, and alas, no soul animating its heaving, clunky corpse. The effect is neither scary nor dramatic nor funny nor interesting nor touching nor compelling. It’s odd, this movie. You get the sense that each of its parts belong somewhere in a good movie. Take the score, for instance. Its persistent foreboding tones do a nice job of casting an ominous pall over the whole movie. But why? A scene where two people are playing with a puppy has no use for the music from “There Will Be Blood”.

Or consider the acting. Tom Hardy is a gifted actor. And he is by far the most compelling person in this movie. One wishes he could save the movie. Perhaps in another version of it—with the right context (and more of it)—he could. But here Hardy’s character is perplexing, and not in a good way. At times he seems quiet and dim-witted, but at other times he comes off as sharp and assertive. His true character never really emerges—it never finds a place in this script. It would be nice if this could be chalked up to complexity or mysteriousness. But I doubt it can.

No, “The Drop” is a collection of poorly organized parts—some of which are silly and cliché in their own right, others of which could be good parts of a better movie.