This wonderful new crime thriller written by Denis Lehane (‘Mystic River’,’Gone Baby Gone’) set in Boston his hometown, is the story of Bob a solitary loner who is a bartender is his cousin Marv’s bar. Well the name over the door is still Marv’s but after he got heavily into debt gambling, he was forced to sell the place to a bunch of Chechen mobsters who kept him on as the manager.Now the Bar is just one of many seedy watering holes in the city that, on any given night, is designated as the temporary bank for the gang’s illicit cash. When it’s the turn of Marv’s Bar to be ‘the drop’ envelopes stuffed full of cash are discreetly slipped across the counter throughout the night and go into a time release safe. In the early hours of the morning the mobsters come around to the empty bar to remove the safe’s entire contents.
Marv is still in debt, but this time not from gambling, but unpaid bills from the expensive nursing home where his elderly father resides, and so he decides that he will stage a hold-up of his own bar on ‘the drop’ night. First he goes for a ‘dry run’ and gets a couple of inexperienced and petty criminals to rob the cash register one night. This really annoys the Chechen boss who suspect foul play and turn the heat up on both Marv and Bob, who also attracts the attention of the investigating detective who recognises as the strange loner who attends Mass every morning.
Whatever Bob thinks may be going on here, he keeps to himself and focuses his attention on an abused pup he discovers, and on Nadia the pretty neighbor who offers to help him care for his new charge. Bob’s charity quickly goes awry when he is visited by a menacing stranger called Eric Deeds who demands the return of the dog. and who also threatens Nadia turns out to be his ex-girlfriend who he also physically abused.Deeds is recruited by Marv to replace the incompetent robbers who the Chechan’s had tracked down and ‘eliminated’. Now as he enters Marv’s Bar with a reluctant Nadia on his arm on a designated ‘drop’ night that Marv has mysteriously called in ‘sick’ Bob knows that something is about to go down and will not end well for maybe all of them.
This rather bloody and violent movie ended up being the late great James Gandolfini’s last role. and in which as Marv he turns in his usual wonderful performance as the gruff big man who is clearly out of his depth with the new regime of mobsters that now reign in his town. It is however the singularly impressive and ultra-sensitive performance of Tom Hardy as the quiet, intensely private bartender Bob that unquestionably steals this movie. The man seemingly gets better in every film he makes, but this will surely go down as one of his very best. Lehane had based the script on his short story ‘Animal Rescue’ and deliberately didn’t pad out the tale, giving the actors perfect opportunities to help us try and figure out all the unspoken and implied sub-plots that were going on too.
Directed by Belgian Michaël R. Roskam (‘Bullhead’) who also cast one of his regular actors Matthias Schoenaerts as Deeds, and Swedish actress Noomi Rapace to complete this truly international cast. ‘The Drop’ is one of those ‘small’ movies that may never ever appear on people’s radar, which is such a pity as the combination on Hardy and Gandolfini alone so deserves as audience.
