You have to sit through the slow parts to savor the cool parts. The movie's little surprise is that you didn't waste your time watching it; you were just being primed for an explosion of low volume and high impact.
Free of the extraneous nuts and bolts that so often come with crime dramas, turning simple moments like a well-placed umbrella into something genuinely menacing.
Gandolfini died suddenly, at age 51, shortly after finishing The Drop. That leaves us hanging on his every exquisitely timed pause, and sensing the sheer weight of his personality every time he enters a room.
Not that it needed demonstrating, but Hardy once again shows what quiet force and phenomenal range he has. He's like a young Liam Neeson with Michael Fassbender chops.
The Drop's unpredictability is organic rather than sensationalistic. The movie doesn't pull surprises out of thin air for the sole purpose of shocking an audience - it lets them develop naturally.
