The Drop

Written by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island), expanding on his own short story 'Animal Rescue', The Drop is a low-key crime thriller with a plot that's just window dressing for a character study.

Tom Hardy is Bob Saginowski, the quiet, softly-spoken bartender of a Brooklyn bar managed by the tight-fisted Marv (Gandolfini). Marv once owned the bar but lost it to Chechen gangsters, who force the hapless guys to find the thieves who held up the bar just after Christmas and made off with five grand. As detective (John Orvitz) asks awkward questions, thinking Bob and Marv know more than they're letting on, Bob strikes up a friendship with Nadia (Rapace) when they find an injured dog in her trash but her violent ex (Schoenaerts) prevents them getting cosy.

Ushered to Hollywood after his Oscar-nominated 2011 crime drama Bullhead, director Michael R. Roskam delivers a solid thriller first time out. It may not make the pulse race but it does take the effort to steer away from genre conventions. Predictable it's not.

Roskam and Lehane have a very streamlined story but use it as a blueprint to branch out and explore the characters that inhabit this underworld. Marv isn't a Scrooge, he needs a quick cash injection to keep his father plugged into a life support system in a nursing home. He's got a live-in sister too, who is putting him under pressure to save for the cruise they've been dreaming about. The marks on Rapace's neck aren't, as we're led to believe, from the hands of her twitchy ex, who may or may not be lying as to his criminal background. Peel the onion.

Despite the time taken to dip into private lives, this is Bob's story and it's hard to get a handle on him. Sometimes he's a kind lunkhead buying drinks for the lonely old woman at the end of the bar, and shrinking from Eric's imposing frame, but sometimes there's a flash across the eyes that suggest a History of Violence-esque past; at one point, when a severed arm turns up at the back door, he knows exactly what to do to get rid of it. Inconsistency might be at the heart of all of us but it makes for a confusing character.

The Drop never kicks on. Roskam and Lehane do what they can to spice things up in the third act as the big titular night approaches - one bar a night is chosen for criminals to store that night's takings and the climactic night happens to Marv's bar - but it's like trying to shift into fifth gear when it's been stuck in second.

Hardy's introspective, nuanced performance is strong enough to make one forget that this is Gandolfini's last role. While his Marv is not the big send-off role it is a reminder of how strong a character actor he was.