The late James Gandolfini returns in final hard-boiled role

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This article was published 12/09/2014 (4355 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For his last movie role in The Drop, James Gandolfini returned to the scuzzy criminal realm where he made his thespian bones.

The film might be worth watching for that alone. The actor, who died at the age of 51 last year, had a genius for portraying both the brutishness and animal cunning of wise guys. Requiescat in pace, Tony Soprano.

Adapted from a Dennis Lehane short story by Lehane himself, The Drop allows Gandolfini to play a cowed, under-achieving variant of Tony. He’s “Cousin Marv,” an ex-hoodlum managing the Brooklyn bar he used to own until some seriously violent Chechen mobsters moved in and took over.

Marv, we learn, really is cousin to Bob (Tom Hardy), his fellow barkeep. Next to the sardonic Marv, Bob is slow to anger, and maybe a little slow, period. When their establishment is robbed by a pair of masked thugs, Bob is rattled enough to tell the investigating detective (John Ortiz) that one of the thieves wore a stopped watch on his wrist. Marv is obliged to explain that even under these stressful circumstances, you don’t tell the police anything. Sure enough, the aforementioned mob guys show up to tell Marv and Bob that they will be held responsible for making up the stolen cash.

As this is happening, Bob comes by a brutalized pit bull pup stuffed in a garbage can outside the house of Nadia (Noomi Rapace, the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in panic mode), a damaged young woman in the neighbourhood. Overcoming her own default setting of suspicion, Nadia forms a pleasant but asexual friendship with Bob, based on caring for the dog.

More trouble: Nadia’s unhinged ex-boyfriend Eric Deeds (Mathias Schoenhaerts), the guy who injured the dog, shows up to extort money from Bob by claiming the pup’s ownership. Upping the intimidation factor, he claims to be the guy who committed a particularly nasty murder in the neighbourhood some years earlier.

The pressure on Bob increases when he begins to suspect someone is going to rob the bar on the evening of the Super Bowl, the same night Cousin Marv’s becomes “the drop” for hundreds of thousands of dollars in mob money. And there is no paying that back without serious bloodshed.

Director Micha´l R. Roskam does tend to drop the narrative thread here and there; and things sometimes lapse into a state of minor confusion. But it remains an admirable exercise in hard-boiled menace.

Curious thing: Roskam (Bullhead) is Belgian, Hardy is British and Rapace is Swedish, yet The Drop feels like a thoroughly retro exercise in American film noir as character study. Part of that has to do with Gandolfini, an actor of such authentic New York toughness as to suggest he might have been genetically engineered by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and midwifed by Sidney Lumet.

Much of the film’s appeal has to do with Hardy, an actor whose preternatural subtlety suggests still waters on the surface and roiling turbulence beneath, which is very much what is required here.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca