The Drop

“I just tend bawwwww,” Tom Hardy drawls, in a passable take on Brooklynese, the taciturn barman claiming he’s above the low-rent criminal milieu in which he mixes the drinks; the lad, obviously, doth protestin’ too much.

Hardy’s sonorous, sing-song Welsh accent sat at the centre of Locke – it was, after all, a film whose drama consisted entirely of Hardy making phone calls, the timbre of his voice as important as the content – but his accent, here, is just as symbolic. The Drop is a film that affects the authentic airs of small-time goons in a rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighbourhood, but fills its cast with European actors whose accents range from passable (Hardy) to horrible-if-it’s-supposed-to-sound-local (Noomi Rapace, whose bizarre multi-national register remains unremarked-upon, here, just as it was in Prometheus) to a fantastic-part-of-a-menacing-turn (Matthias Schoenaerts, all coiled physicality).

Belgian auteur Michaël R Roskam, who directed Schoenaerts in the eye-catching Bullhead, here makes his American debut. Comparisons to other, better crime movies persist – even something as contemporaneous as Andrew Dominik’s brilliant Killing Them Softly – but, though it feels like a well-worn entry in a well-worn genre, The Drop doesn’t lack merit.

Adapted by Dennis Lehane from his own short story, it’s a fully-formed world full of literary symbols (even if some are a little on-the-nose), its single-neighbourhood setting claustrophobic, disconnected from the outside world. Lehane works the drama towards a climax whose flip-the-script reversal is expertly timed and delivered with showstopper chutzpah. And, The Drop marks the final-ever film for James Gandolfini, whose hangdog air and desperate fatalism give the picture a haunted quality. Where, around him, foreign thesps try out their low-rent accents and method-acted takes on the tortured-criminal, Gandolfini sits calmly in the middle, the acme model, effortlessly bringing gravity and grace to his every scene.