Critics reviews

The Drop is, I think, a plainly ridiculous movie... Nevertheless, I found [its] silliness sort of endearing. It helps that Tom Hardy exudes warmth so naturally, here playing the ne'er-do-well heavy in a hapless, even dopey way, with an accent that reminded me a little of Adam Sandler.

Roskam directed the constantly improving Schoenaerts in the 2011 Belgian crime thriller Bullhead. That was a more overheated cousin to this new movie, which has the seediness you've come to expect from something set around a mob-owned bar. Lehane writes some sharp, funny exchanges, but the longer the movie goes on, the less original it becomes and the harder it is to believe — even with Hardy doing a legible, alluring variation on Marlon Brando.

[Hardy's performance is] a remarkably cagey piece of acting, upon which The Drop ultimately depends for its unexpected source of power, and confirms that Hardy is his generation's equivalent of Gary Oldman—a chameleon whose transformations never seem skin-deep.

A standard gangster story on its surface, The Drop patiently develops some interesting ideas as it progresses, minimizing the focus on money and playing up the concept of a gangster demimonde fueled primarily by insecurity, with pointless squabbles over reputation and petty personal grudges keeping the cycle of violence flowing.

European actors do an uneven job bringing a "hey-yous-guys" Brooklyn crime drama to life in the English-language debut of Belgium's Michaël R. Roskam (Bullhead). The film's distinctly working-class Catholic vibe is best attributed to Mystic River's Dennis Lehane, whose source material—a 2009 short story called "Animal Rescue"—has been expanded by the author himself into a script that probably worked better on page (and in his original setting of Boston's scrappy Dorchester).