2014: #33

#33 The Drop

When all is said and done, James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano may go down as my favorite television performance of all time. I've said it before and I'll say it again: There is no Walter White without Tony Soprano before him. There is no Francis "Frank" Underwood. There is no Vic Mackey. There is no flawed antihero to root for, challenging nearly every ounce of your moral compass.

Reportedly, portraying the kingpin of New Jersey for almost a decade took a lot out of him, both physically and emotionally. He was constantly asked to go to the darkest nadirs of the soul in one scene and follow it with stand-up comedy the next. As a result, he fought to avoid taking the easy roles that would pigeonhole him as a one-trick gangster. There was the pained monster of Where the Wild Things Are, the conflicted businessman in Welcome to the Rileys, military figureheads both funny (In the Loop) and serious (Zero Dark Thirty), and the quiet, sensitive love interest in Enough Said, perhaps the best of the lot performance-wise. For his last onscreen role, he was asked to take a step back into the role of a boss, and for whatever reason, it didn't feel quite right.

Tom Hardy plays Bob Saginowski, a bartender at Cousin Marv's (Gandolfini), which is what's known as a "drop bar", a central holding bank for mob activity that always rotates. One night on the walk home, he finds an injured pit bull in the trash can outside of a house. Out comes Nadia (Noomi Rapace) to investigate what's happening in her garbage. They fix up the dog and she holds onto it; he'll come back and take care of it in a few days if no one claims it. No one does, and he keeps him and names him Rocco. Later at the bar, two men come in and rob the place. As he's handing over the cash, Bob notices that the one of the guys has a broken watch and tells the cops. This leads to whole bunch of Chechen mobsters threatening the bar for possibly selling them out, and a psychopath named Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenarts) coming around to run tabs on Bob and Nadia. The plot thereafter and sheer amount of double-crosses made my head spin all the way up to the somewhat cool, mostly confusing, kind of disappointing resolution. Gandolfini was good, not great, as Cousin Marv, an irritable thug with much less charisma and gravitas than we're used to from him. Hardy, though, spoke and acted Brooklyn so well that I forgot I was actually watching a veteran of the West End.