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The Drop | 2014 | R | - 2.7.10

A Brooklyn bartender (Tom Hardy) helps to pass ill-gotten cash ("drops") to mob bosses through his bar business. Bullied by his older cousin (James Gandolfini), who lost the bar to Chechen mobsters, the bartender becomes entangled in police investigations, animal and domestic abuse and his cousin's increasingly strange behavior. Also with Noomi Rapace, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ann Dowd, John Ortiz and James Frecheville. Directed by Michael R. Roskam. [1:46]

SEX/NUDITY 2 - At a doorway in a shadowed corridor we see three women wearing knee-length dresses; in the foreground a man with a wad of money in his hand walks down dark steps toward the camera and below the frame (prostitution is implied).
 A man holding a woman at gunpoint in her house kisses her on the nose and she winces; the man then forces her to go to a bar with him (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details) and she wears a sweater off one shoulder, revealing the strap to a camisole and part of her shoulder; the bartender demands for her to tell him if she is dating the man who brought her and she says no.
 An older man tells bar patrons that the bartender is a "[anatomical term deleted] man," since he had a date, and that women are now "throwing it [implying opportunities for sex] at him"; he asks the bartender if a male detective in the bar is going to let the bartender wear his leather coat, or does the detective have to twist the bartender's nipples first?

VIOLENCE/GORE 7 - A man breaks into an ex-girlfriend's house and demands that she come with him to a bar; she refuses, but he forces her at gunpoint, then after closing, the man approaches the bar with a handgun and demands $10,000, then he demands that the bartender open the safe and turn over many more thousands of dollars from illegal cash drops; the bartender stalls, telling the man and the woman that he once shot a man twice in the face in the bar, killing him and then that he put the head in a towel and put the body in a tank full of soap and lye; the gunman becomes impatient, and the bartender pulls a handgun from under the bar and shoots the man twice in the face (the body falls hard, face down and we see the face lying in a large pool of flowing blood).
 A man parks his car and sends another man riding with him to the trunk of the car to get something, the driver backs over the other man, then pulls forward over him, crushing him twice as we hear thumps; we see a twisted body (likely dead) lying in the dark behind the car (no blood is shown).
 A man sits at night in his parked car and argues with another man on the phone, then hangs up as another man walks to the driver's side window and shoots a handgun through the glass twice; we hear two shots and do not see the results, but the driver is presumably dead. Two masked men point a handgun and a shotgun at a bar manager, robbing the bar of what we later hear is $5,000 from the cash register; we see a man at the back door as he sits up from below the frame and his face is bloody on the top of the head, forehead and mouth and another man walks outside and says that the injured man's head is split open. Mob bosses drive up to the back of a bar and open the back of their van where we see a man with a bloody face and taped mouth and hear him whining and bleating as men in the van hold him down (we see bloody rags near the door of the van); two other men say that they do not recognize the man, the van doors close and the mob bosses drive off (the victim does not appear again).
 A man finds a trash bag stuck on a fence and opens it to reveal bloody US currency and a bloody forearm cut at the elbow; another man curses and the camera cuts to a room, where the first man neatly wraps the arm and a handgun in layers of plastic wrap, freezer paper, and more plastic wrap before stuffing the arm into a duffel bag that he then takes to a river where he disposes of the arm; a detective a man knows walks up, asks why the duffel bag is so empty and the man says that he lost all the dog toys that were in it and used all the "poop bags" while walking his dog. We see a back bar mirror, broken and covered in blood as the camera cuts to a room where a man wraps up packages of something and places them in the bottom of a chest freezer, under frozen meats; while we see no flesh, the packages are probably parts of a dead man's body.
 A man bullies another man and they argue several times about how to run the bar business. A man curses and nags another man in a bar about taking down Christmas decorations on December 27th, sarcastically telling patrons that the younger man is a "[anatomical term deleted] man" since having one date (please see the Sex/Nudity category for more details), and generally talks down to him. A man says that he is not like people who "Are as dumb as retarded people in wheelchairs who have colostomy bags."
  A man walks home after work at night, hears whining in a trashcan and discovers a wounded pit bull puppy inside as a woman from the nearby house asks what is going on and agrees to take the puppy indoors and we see blood from a red, raw patch on its head has dripped down his cheek to his throat; the man and the woman wash the blood off.
 Men wearing dark clothing and in shadows collect money from dimly lit businesses; envelopes of money are dropped into a sort of chute inside a bar and we later see men pick up the envelopes from the bar operators.
 A man sees a raw, red half-moon mark on a woman's throat and she says she was high (on drugs) and cut her own throat. A man sees three half-moon marks healed into scars on a woman, and the woman implies that her ex-boyfriend, a street criminal, made the marks via abuse. A man scrubs a small bit of blood from his carpet and we see a bloody spot on a puppy's paw. We see a man washing bloody currency and straightening it to dry before two men come the next day to pick up the cash and complain that it is not fully dry, but accept it.
 Two men argue over ownership of a dog at the second man's house and the second man tells the first man, "You beat him"; a few days later the first man returns and demands $10,000 for the dog, or he will go to the police to have the implanted owner's microchip read, repossess the dog, refuse to feed it for several days and then beat its head in with a rock.
 A man shows an older man a handgun that he has tucked in the front of his jeans waistband, for protection, because his brother was the victim of murder after the two did a robbery together. A man tells a woman that several years ago; he killed another man to keep him quiet.
 A voiceover says, "The devil waits for your body to quit, because he owns your soul" then adds that maybe there is no devil and that when you die and stand before God, He tells you to go away and that you must be alone forever. A police detective tells a man that street criminals have been disappearing, then whispers in the man's ear that "No one ever sees you comin', do they?" before leaving.
 We hear that an older man's father is in a nursing home, with unpaid bills since Medicaid reduced payments and the first man argues with his sister about what to do with Dad; the woman says that he's dead and her brother asks what the beeps from the equipment attached to him are; she says, "That's electricity" and her brother says that "they" (the US medical system) just want to kill off older people and tells his sister to decide to pull the plug herself.

LANGUAGE 10 - About 66 F-words and its derivatives, 16 scatological terms, 3 anatomical terms, 1 mild obscenity, name-calling (dumb, idiots, genius, snitch, retarded, nut job, junkie, pussy man, old biddy, punk, cuckoo house), stereotypical references to men, women, dog owners, street criminals, neighborhood bar owners, detectives, New Yorkers, Catholics, Chechen mobsters, 7 religious exclamations (Oh My God, Jesus, Oh God, Thank God, Recital of the Lord's Prayer in a cathedral).

SUBSTANCE USE - A man mentions that some men in the neighborhood are criminals who are mentally ill (from the cuckoo house) and junkies, a man tells a detective that a buddy left the bar one night in order to "score some weed" (buy marijuana), a woman says that she was high once and cut her own throat because of the effects of the drug (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details), a woman says that a man who is a drug dealer used to be her boyfriend, and a woman places ointment from an unmarked tube onto a puppy's head. A short glass of whiskey is shown on a bar at which no one is sitting, there are several bar scenes where men drink shots of clear liquor and bottles of beer as well as men and a few women drinking bottles of beer and shots of clear liquor along the bar, two men chug double shots of a lightly colored liquor and one of them has an open bottle of beer (he does not drink it), a bartender pours a shot of vodka for a man who drinks it, a man and a woman drink vodka over ice at separate times, a man and a woman each drink two bottles of beer, and an older man gives a younger man a bottle of beer in a café (it is left untouched). A woman leans out of her first floor window at night and smokes a cigarette, a woman smokes outside her house in a couple of scenes, a man smokes several cigarettes throughout the film (in a bar where he works, at home, in an alley, standing in various doorways and in a car), a man smokes a cigarette in scenes inside two houses, in a park and in a driveway, an open pack of cigarettes is shown on a back bar, and a man walks outside a bar with a pack of cigarettes in his hand (we do not see him smoke).

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Crime, business ethics, money laundering, gambling debts, murder, illness, addictions, foreign mob bosses, vigilantes, revenge, justice, relationships, friendship, aging, animal abuse and rescue, domestic violence.

MESSAGE - People sometimes take the law into their own hands.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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