Director Michael R. Roskam’s The Drop is as much a character study as it is a crime drama. Thanks to lived-in performances and a smart script by Dennis Lehane (adapted from his short story “Animal Rescue”), it pulls off the nifty trick of not letting you know exactly what kind of character you’ve been studying until the very end of the movie.
Tom Hardy stars as Bob, a Brooklyn barkeep who works for his cousin Marv (James Gandolfini) at a drinking establishment appropriately named Cousin Marv’s. Although Marv’s name might be on the sign outside—a fact that he enjoys bringing up whenever possible—the actual owner is a vicious Chechen gangster who doesn’t look kindly upon the two men after the joint gets robbed.
Meanwhile, Bob strikes up a relationship with Nadia (Noomi Rapace) after discovering a beaten and abandoned puppy in her garbage can—which turns out to have been placed there by her psychotic ex-boyfriend Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts), a frightening local figure who claims to be responsible for a murder in the neighborhood. Bob adopts the pit bull and begins dating Nadia, but Eric doesn’t like Bob moving in on his dog or his woman; when the psychopath turns up at Cousin Marv’s not long after the robbery, Bob begins to wonder if there’s a connection.
The plot is certainly well-drawn—you understand everyone’s motivations exactly as Roskam and Lehane want you to—but The Drop is the kind of movie that lives and dies on its performances, and Hardy gives one of his best. Bob seems like a simple and good man right from the beginning: He’s gentle, but tough and smart. He lacks both aggression and fear, and that’s a fascinating emotional makeup for a character surrounded by killers and threats. Hardy fully inhabits this character, recalling the stoic grace of Bogart without the romanticism or ’70s-era De Niro minus the seething menace. His naturalism gives this story, which is steeped in genre tropes, a sense of realism.
The rest of the cast deliver as well. Rapace brilliantly finds an accent for her character that splits the difference between Russia and Brooklyn; John Ortiz connects as a detective trying to piece together what really went down during the robbery at Marv’s; and Gandolfini is as physically commanding as ever in his final screen performance, playing a character that in many ways is the less competent version of his signature role of Tony Soprano.
Roskam and cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis, who previously worked together on Bullhead, whip up a gritty, noirish vibe that keeps us on edge. The threat of violence seems almost constant, but they modulate the tension between a low simmer and a boil as the movie progresses. By the end, when all is revealed, you can appreciate how well this story has been told. The Drop is such a solid piece of filmmaking that it feels like an old-fashioned noir that has stood the test of time, remaining a favorite of cinephiles decades after the studio that produced it thought they were delivering just another B-movie.