The Drop is directed by Michael R. Roskam, who wrote and directed the Academy Award Foreign Film Nominated Bullhead, which I’ll seek out now that I’ve seen the understated beauty of The Drop, viewed at the always-smells-like-a-swampy locker room Pittsford Cinema near Rochester, New York.
The Drop is another in the litter of a new genre I’m naming “films starring dead people” with James Gandolfini and the very much alive Tom Hardy. Gandolfini, despite what I heard Marshall fine say, is simply playing Tony Soprano on the skids. Tom Hardy, a new actor on my radar, does a brilliant job at understatement or portraying the understatement written by Dennis Lehane. Hardy’s Bob is a coat buttoned up surprise, and only at the movie’s end do you realize the performance’s brilliance.
Noomi Rapace’s Nadia, Bob’s would be romance interest, is also very believable as a blue collar city cynic.
And while any animal rescue person will salivate without bells at the cute pitbull Rocco, I found the movie lacking for the average girl, and this from a woman who loved and saw Drive (you know, the movie Albert Brooks got ripped off from an Oscar nom from). In other words, I don’t neemd a rom-com to make me happy, but give the romance a little more heat and the conflict between Bob and a rapacious ex-boyfirend character Eric played sinisterly by Rust and Bones’ Matthias Schoenaerts would have been more palpable.
Instead, the movie simmers too long and I almost left a little depressed, as if Tom Hardy’s Bob was the guy you didn’t appreciate until he was gone.
