The Drop

Directed by Michaël R. Roskam
Starring Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and James Gandolfini
In UK cinemas November 14th, 2014

by Joanna Orland

Tom Hardy has a chameleonic voice.  From playing the English that he is to Ivan’s Welsh in Locke to nonsense as Bane in Batman, Hardy has mastered the art of voice acting.  In The Drop Hardy morphs his voice yet again, this time into the form of a Brooklyn accent.  A classic mob story, Bob (Hardy) is a bartender and “just a bartender” as he works for his Cousin Marv (Gandolfini) at his bar, a business that is used to launder money for the mob.

Marv gets greedy and arranges the robbery of his own bar in order to defy the mob.  Meanwhile, Bob finds a puppy in a garbage can and falls for the woman Nadia (Rapace) whose trash can it is.   Nadia eventually warms to Bob’s charms, but their budding romance and pet ownership is disrupted by Eric Deeds, the dog’s owner and Nadia’s ex-boyfriend.

Watching Hardy snuggling with a puppy is probably one of the best things about this movie.  Plot twists become absurd, and very little empathy is felt towards any of the characters.  The performances while mostly high calibre sometimes wane into laughable territory, some intentional, some most definitely not.

While not a terrible film, The Drop may do just that off of our film radar.