Talented cast shines in Gandolfini’s final film, ‘The Drop’

“You see in Brooklyn, money changes hands all night long, it’s just not the kind you can deposit in the bank. It needs to end up somewhere – they call it a drop bar. A bar the bosses choose randomly each night to be the safe for an entire city and in the mean time, I just tend bar.”

The setting may be overly familiar, (small time crooks and a blue-collar bar.) The plot a little predictable, (will the guys who knock off the bar get away with it?) But the acting in “The Drop” is so good, that the other stuff almost doesn’t matter.

Based on a screenplay by Dennis Lehane, the man responsible for “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Drop” continues the writer’s good luck streak of benefiting from brilliant casting.

British actor Tom Hardy plays a quiet Brooklyn bartender named Bob who works the bar for his cousin Marv, played by James Gandolfini.

Bob is a loner who seems a little slow on the uptake. He talks in very measured tones and moves almost as deliberately.

Ill-at-ease with others, he ends up bonding with a hard-luck young woman over a wounded dog they nurse back to health. She knows he hangs out with unsavory characters.

Bob does his best to keep a low profile but when his bar gets robbed, early in the movie, he’s inevitably pulled back into “the life.”

Right there with him is cousin Marv (Gandolfini,) who used to be a big shot before he was squeezed out of business by the Chechen mob.

“The Drop” is James Gandolfini’s final film and he’s excellent in it. (Imagine a Tony Soprano gone to seed.)

But he’s just part of a great supporting cast that also includes Noomi Rapace (the original “Girl with a Dragon Tattoo,”) rising Belgian star Matthias Schoenaerts, John Ortiz (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s theater buddy), and Ann Dowd of “Compliance” fame.

“The Drop” is a small movie with a “big” cast.