John Candy and “Wagons East.” Raul Julia and “Street Fighter.” These are just a couple of examples of actors being in really bad movies, not knowing it will be the last ones they do before their untimely deaths. While “The Drop” is not as awful as the aforementioned pictures, it still has the late James Gandolfini going out on a bad movie.
Bob (Tom Hardy) and Cousin Marv (Gandolfini) run a popular bar in Brooklyn that just so happens to be one of the many drop bars the mob uses for money laundering and where they drop money off for their betting needs. After the place gets robbed, Bob and Marv find themselves in a heap of trouble from their “bosses.” The movie is based on the short story “Animal Rescue” by Dennis Lehane. There is also a side story about Bob finding an abused dog in a trash can and with the help of Noomi Rapace, they nurse it back to health.
The top of the movie poster for “The Drop” reads, “From the author of ‘Mystic River’ and ‘Gone Baby Gone’ so it is easy to see how the picture attracted such great stars for it. However, in those movies someone else wrote the screenplays based on Lehane’s work. I am unfamiliar with the short story on which this is based, but either Dennis Lehane should stick to writing novels (if you think those movies are good wait until you read those books) or the producers should have found a more veteran director than Michaël R. Roskam to bring it to the screen. Perhaps it is a bit of both.
