Currently being hyped as James Gandolfini's last film, The Drop is moody crime drama from novelist Denis Lehane. Better known for Oscar winning Mystic River, Lehane's milieu is working class New England. The mood is always somber, portentous with the threat of violence on the horizon. I'm not a fan because I find the working class Lehane portrays to be white, humorless, nostalgic for good old Catholicism and predictable.
Annoyingly, Hollywood seems to find Lehane's stories real and they therefore draw big acting talent and budgets. Gandolfini doesn't stray far from his tough guy chops, but knowing he's gone certainly made me appreciate his burly menace, a certain sadness and his sense of humor. Tom Hardy does an adequate job, but his character, a mild, seemingly slow-witted sidekick with a very hard interior seemed robotic and ultimately a disposable plot device.
No new territory is mined here. There's a mistreated working class girl in need of a savior. People rip off gangsters, in this case the Chechen mob, and people get their just, bloody rewards. The acting and plot keep the ball rolling, the editing and camerawork is fine, but like Lehane's other explorations of human weakness, eventually I felt like I was eating a bread sandwich.
