Movie Review: The Drop

3 stars out of 5

I was at the movies when James Gandolfini died. I remember driving back with my buddy Sean, looking at my phone, and seeing everyone writing to me on Facebook or texting, “Dude, where’s your R.I.P.?”

So that was real sad. Especially with the Jersey connection.

Still, now that more than a year has passed, I feel I can finally say: I haven’t been totally knocked over with Gandolfini’s film work. Sure, he was a terrific actor, a very soulful actor. But I really felt that on-screen, he was always Tony Soprano. Sometimes a quieter Tony Soprano, sometimes a bearded Tony Soprano, but always, always Tony.

And that’s fine when the movie calls for a Tony Soprano. Like this one does. I just wish The Drop was a little bit better.

You want an artist to go out on a high note, and I was getting worried for ol’ Jimmy G. Some people really, really liked Enough Said (in which he played a neutered Tony Soprano) but I found it so-so, with an absurd plot. Then I was holding off on watching Down the Shore, from 2011, because I thought, this will be the one I love: Tony Soprano running a faded Jersey shore amusement park. Alas, it was merely okay—poorly written, poorly directed.

So The Drop would be his last chance. Odds looked good: Well-respected thriller guy Dennis Lehane did the screenplay (and the short story it was based on), Tom Hardy takes off his Bane mouthpiece, and Gandolfini is very well cast as Tony Soprano, former owner of a divy Brooklyn bar now run by underworld Chechens. It is almost a very good movie.

It’s certainly not easy to make a great thriller. You don’t want it to be too easy to guess, but you don’t want answers to come out of the blue, either. And thrillers often get filled with clichéd characters or become hopelessly convoluted and/or completely ridiculous.

The Drop stays on the positive side of all those traits, but just barely. It is a genre piece, so we get our stock characters: the innocent in the middle of a world of crime (Hardy), the gruff older guy (Gandolfini), the foreign baddie and his henchmen, the troubled woman also caught in the middle, the psycho wild-card (generally someone’s brother but not this time around), and the well-meaning, persistent cop.

Hardy is terrific. Totally unrecognizable compared to Bane. It is almost stupid that he’s this nice guy caring for a wounded dog, but Hardy pulls it off. My only gripe is that in his opening voiceover (which reoccurs later in the film), Hardy does an over-the-top Brooklyn accent, often a risk with British actors playing Americans. But when actually on-screen, he’s great, and much more subtle.

The Gandolfini character starts out way too cartoonish: This extremely grumpy, unlikable guy. Hey, you’d be pissed off too if you lived with your sister who leads a bunch of silent people dressed in white on The Leftovers. But over the course of the film, we begin to understand his motivations, and Gandolfini does a good job turning this caricature into a more complete person.

Lehane provides some sharp writing, the setting feels pretty realistic, and the movie did keep me guessing. It is definitely watchable, just not… great. Blame the directing? Blame a too-familiar scenario, or a little too much plot? Don’t blame Gandolfini—he does a real good Tony in this one.