The Drop (2014)

Directed by: Michaël R. Roskam

Cousin Marv’s, a bar somewhere in Brooklyn. A neighbourhood where criminals still run the streets. It is not a place you escape easily, unless you have money. Marv (James Gandolfini) lives with his sister, is fat, jaded, has money problems and a history of crime. Bob (Tom Hardy), who is Marv’s cousin, is quiet, solitary, loyal, goes to church and is kind to animals.

When the bar is robbed at gun-point, the Chechens whose money it is want it back. These are not people you want to mess with.

Things get more complicated when a puppy that Bob has rescued, and a woman (Noomi Rapace) who helps him, are both threatened by suspected killer Eric (Matthias Schoenaert, marvellously unhinged).

So far this could be the tale of how two lovely, lonely people escape the madness and find a place where they can be together, with a puppy.

This is not that film.

Marv does not own Cousin Marv’s. He sold out years before to the Chechens. But the bar is not theirs, either, though they do not yet understand that. Do they have an inkling, as the film ends? Perhaps. A police detective has just about figured it out, though he is reduced to standing on the sidelines, in awe of the operator he has glimpsed.

This is Bob’s bar, and Bob’s film. Tom Hardy’s character is central to everything that is happening, neither bystander nor (strictly speaking) protagonist – but the supreme opportunist, a manager of unfolding events and their consequences.

His performance calls two mind two other recent roles: his quiet, shambling bootlegger in Lawless; but even more his turn as the eponymous project manager in Locke. There, as here, he is a man who will deal with what is happening and put it right – though here his character does not so much reveal itself as erupt from the bar counter, with more than a nod to The Usual Suspects.

The rest of the cast – particularly Gandolfini – provide outstanding support, and the score by Marco Beltrami effectively underscores the rising tension.

Go see.