'The Drop': A Tense and Arresting Crime Drama About a Brooklyn Bartender Drawn Into a Dangerous World of Criminality
The Drop (2014) is a restrained yet gripping crime drama starring Tom Hardy as Bob Saginowski, a soft-spoken bartender working at a neighborhood establishment in Brooklyn. The bar is owned by his embittered cousin Marv (James Gandolfini), though control of the business has long since passed to Chechen mobsters who use the establishment as a collection point for illicit cash.
After the bar is robbed at gunpoint, Bob and Marv find themselves under increasing pressure to recover the missing money before their employers lose patience. Bob's story is further complicated when he discovers an abandoned pit bull and becomes acquainted with Nadia (Noomi Rapace), a troubled woman who helps him care for the animal. Their tentative relationship soon draws the attention of Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts), Nadia's volatile former boyfriend, whose menacing presence forces Bob to confront circumstances he has spent years quietly avoiding.
Directed by Belgian filmmaker Michaël R. Roskam (Bullhead, Racer and the Jailbird) and adapted by Dennis Lehane from his short story "Animal Rescue," The Drop is an absorbing tale of entanglement steeped in shades of loneliness and suppressed violence. Hardy is superb in a performance of remarkable restraint, while Gandolfini brings weary resentment and wounded pride to one of his final screen roles. Roskam allows the tension to grow steadily just beneath the film's surface, before culminating in a reckoning that exposes a stunning capacity for violence concealed behind Bob's seemingly placid demeanor.
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