The Drop

Can a plot twist save a movie that up until that point isn’t very good? That’s the question I found myself asking after The Drop. Even if an ending makes the audience rethink what they just saw, does it make up for the fact that the rest of the picture leading up to it is rather boring and unengaging? Before I could decide on an answer, my mind had already moved on to other things, so I guess in this case it's a “no” by default.

The story follows Tom Hardy and the late James Gandolfini as, respectively, the bartender and the on-paper owner of a dive bar in a prototypical “old neighborhood” (the kind you have to wonder even exists in Brooklyn anymore). In reality, the bar is owned by Chechen gangsters and acts as a “drop bar” where they temporarily stash their dirty money. One night, the bar is robbed by two masked men, and the two are tasked to retrieve the money and find out who’s responsible.

What follows is a chain of events that make no secret of exactly where the plot is going. There’s no mystery or suspense. Instead, we’re mostly treated to tangential subplots that don’t seem to be going anywhere, or reminiscences about the characters’ better days gone by that we never see. Small punctuations of bloody violence do little to liven up the slogging, sleepy tone of the whole thing (even the initial stickup that puts the whole plot in motion holds no tension). The cast does little but mumble in mangled Brooklyn accents, as if they know this is an inconsequential film during the slow post-summer period and aren’t even trying. And all the gangster movie archetypes are beyond clichéd; somehow, this movie makes them seem even older, like relics from a past era of filmmaking.

Then comes the final revelation, where the picture shifts gears considerably. To be fair, it does add some depth to the characters, a kind of sad, cynical depth. At the very least, it shows that the rest of the film had a point. But as bad as it sounds, it botches it by offering a glimmer of hope. Not only does it dull the ending’s power, but it also sanitizes some pretty awful actions by the characters.

Then again, I’m not sure the picture would have been salvaged if they got the ending right. It’s too slight, too basic, and too insignificant. It’s not even exceptionally bad, just completely mediocre.