Gandolfini plays the role as if it will remind us of Tony, with many of the same mannerisms. The screenplay even gives him a nagging sister and a father in a rest home. He comes off like Tony after his power has been taken away, and his wife has abandoned him. Marv looks like Tony after a decade has passed, and he no longer cares about appearances. The character, once a big man in the neighborhood, has lost power to another entity, and it’s screwing with his pride.

Gandolfini’s Marv owes plenty to his Tony Soprano. The Drop is a slow burn for sure, but when things come to a head it explodes with surprising power. The bar and dog plotlines eventually converge for a finale that’s both tense and completely shocking. It turns out that the dog was intentionally put in the garbage by Nadia’s ex-boyfriend Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts), a creep who brags about having killed somebody, and starts using the dog for blackmail. That unknowing neighbor is Nadia (the wonderful Noomi Rapace), who befriends Bob and helps him with the dog. In the meantime, Bob finds a bloody pit bull puppy in a neighbor’s garbage can. That makes it a prime candidate for another robbery. Their drop bar is to be the money spot for Super Bowl Sunday. Bob and Marv must devise a plan to pay the mobsters back, and when they do, they find themselves in an even deeper dilemma.

This puts Marv in debt to scary Chechen mobsters, now proprietors of the bar Marv once owned. One night, the bar is held up, and Cousin Marv has to hand over five grand. The bar that Cousin Marv and Bob occupy is a drop bar, where many of the gambling winnings in a seedier part of Brooklyn wind up in a safe. Hardy disappears into this role, and will have you in awe that this is actually the guy who played Bane in The Dark Night Rises. That would be the central performance delivered by Tom Hardy as Bob, a seemingly meek bartender of questionable intelligence who works for Cousin Marv (Gandolfini). Luckily for the viewer, it’s not even the best thing about the movie. The Drop features the final film performance of James Gandolfini, and it’s a beauty.

Curtain call movie