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A powerful final act

Tom Hardy. Picture: Supplied

It would be a pleasant surprise and a fitting reward to see the late, great Sopranos star James Gandolfini get a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for his superb final performance in The Drop.

Having died at age 51 earlier this year, the American actor better known as Tony Soprano gave - to my mind - the greatest performance ever (small screen or big) as the Italian mafia crime boss in New Jersey. He gave his mind and body to the role, growing fatter and unhealthier as the series grew over seven magnificent seasons. He drank the wine, ate the pasta, lived the life and suffered the consequences.

A posthumous nomination wouldn't just be a consolation prize for the actor who won just one Golden Globe and three Screen Actor's Guild awards in his brilliant short career.

Gandolfini earns it in The Drop with another excellent performance playing the kind of character Tony Soprano may have become; a fallen kingpin now running a dodgy Brooklyn bar.

The Drop is the new film from author Dennis Lehane, who wrote about Boston's rough neighbourhood and strange accents of Dorchester in Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone (he also wrote Shutter Island). Here he relocates his short story Animal Rescue from Boston's mean streets to Brooklyn's meaner streets, where tiny bars are used as "money drops" for the Russian mobsters that rule the 'hood with iron fists.

The mysterious, mild-mannered Bob (Tom Hardy) is the bartender at one such drop bar owned by former mob kingpin Marv (Gandolfini). Marv is now dictated to by ruthless Russian mobsters (led by Michael Aronov), so when a pair of young hoods rob the bar of $5000, it's up to Bob and Marv to get it back - or else.

Though more low-key and rough-edged than Lehane's showier, more polished book-to- film adaptations, The Drop creates a wonderfully gritty milieu. This bad end of Brooklyn is covered in trash, graffiti, old cars and seedy characters. Even the winter snow is dirty. Director Michael Roskam creates an immersive world that drops you in the heart of Brooklyn that's bad to the bone.

We follow Bob as he's drawn back into the life of violence and money he'd left behind. When he falls for a battered woman (Noomi Rapace), things get personal and he's pushed too far.

Hardy gives another nuanced, nicely modulated performance as the guy who's clearly not as dumb as he pretends to be. It's a front, just as that bar is a front. Yet the subplot with Rapace is clearly just a device to drive Hardy's character back to the life he left behind and it doesn't work so well.

The real pleasure, as said, is watching Gandolfini give his lumbering fallen gangster lots of gravitas. It makes The Drop play like a fitting prologue to The Sopranos, and the final scene of him in his car - awaiting his fate - is powerful, prophetic and moving.