Review: ‘The Drop’

“The Drop” is a small little crime drama that is more about reputation and name recognition within a certain segment of society than it is about any one crime in particular. Despite the trailer making this seem like a movie about a mob-backed bar being knocked off and the bar managers being tasked with finding out who did it, there is actually more going on with multiple characters and an old unsolved crime and a puppy that was thrown away but then saved and then got stuck in the middle of an ownership dispute and there’s something also about a church closing down but that doesn’t really matter. It’s well made and well acted, it just doesn’t add up to much in the end. It’s good, just not great. And there are worse things for a movie to be.

So Tom Hardy plays some guy named Bob and Bob is just a New York boy working for his cousin Marv (James Gandolfini’s last role) bartending at his little shitty tavern, a tavern that Marv operated but no longer owned. Apparently the local Chechen mob bought out Marv’s sometime ago and they really run the show. So when some punk kids rob the bar of $5,000, the Chechens go a little overboard in their mandate to Bob and Marv to recover the money.

Meanwhile, one night while Bob is shuffling home, he finds a beaten and bloody pit bull puppy in a garbage can, and with the help of a random neighborhood girl Nadia (Noomi Rapace) he nurses he puppy and adopts it and calls it Rocco and this ends up being almost as large a part of the story as the bar robbery and the Chechens. Hell, at one point, a guy starts harassing Bob about the puppy, claiming it was his all along, and this guy ends up being a bigger antagonist than the Chechens.

It is kind of interesting how the story starts with some basic conventions and story tropes, it does seem very straight forward, and then it becomes a story of how Bob adopts a puppy and starts caring for it and also at the same time slowly falls in with this Nadia girl. And Bob is an interesting character because he’s always shuffling around and movie slowly and there definitely seems to be a sense of him having a past that he was not really acknowledging, maybe a violent one, because even though he is a soft spoken and seemingly well-natured fella, he is also played by Tom Hardy so because we’ve seen movies before we know this guy is going to capable of unspeakable violence if the occasion arises for its seeming necessity. Really I guess the point of the movie is that Bob is like the pit bull puppy, a little misunderstood by those that don’t know him, and capable of violence because that is how he was raised, that was his upbringing and environment and it shaped him into someone who could do horrible things and then be all like “hey I’m a nice guy, I save puppies from the trash.”

There are a couple of story “twists” that are not that surprising or unexpected, and it feels like the movie was designed for these reveals to be big deals but they really aren’t so it all feels a little flat. That’s why this feels more like a “small” movie, good enough to be watched and enjoyed but people won’t really remember it or talk about it much down the road. It is a decent way to pass some time, especially since there are indeed many movies out there that are much worse, but then again, there are also movies that are much better.

And I love Tom Hardy and he is good but his New Yawk accent work in this movie is kind of terrible.

More puppies, though. In movies in general, I mean. Every movie should have puppies. Actually more real life situations should have puppies. Like when I go to the grocery store, there should be a bin of puppies by the front that I can play with for a minute before going about my day because goddamn it we all know puppies make everything better.