By Peter Killip.

“A knockout thriller with a killer twist.” – Film critic

” The Sopranos meets Marley and Me.”- God awful D.J.

Promotional material can be a prickly pear at the best of times, understandably you need to show enough of the goods to whet the audiences appetite but conversely still need to hold back from showing too much behind the curtain…..tougher than it sounds.

Adapted from the Dennis Lehane short story “Animal Rescue”, it feels more like it’s been fleshed out from a bar napkin composed of drunken ramblings, as even the usual comfortingly familiar characters that Lehane peppers his stories with seem like they’re waiting for their rewritten lines to be shot at a later date.
The neighbourhood is kin to the ones used in other Lehane pot-boilers (“Mystic River” and “Gone,Baby,Gone”) and suitably feels like slipping on an old winter coat but it’s the performances that carry the movie through.

With the powerhouse coupling of the murky past dwelling, brash, bullying and self pitying “Cousin Marv” (the late, great James Gandolfini in a posthumous release.) and the younger, mumbling, scarred but no less troubled “Bob” (Tom Hardy), there’s an almost “Of Mice And Men: The HBO Years.” Slant to it.

“Cousin Marv” has lost his reputation, his bar and his self esteem since the local Chechen mob took over, his bar gets used as the designated “Drop” bar for their dirty money one weekend and it all goes the way of the pear. Before you know it, threats are exchanged, abandoned pets are found in bins, love interests are found and severed limbs start getting wrapped up like a Christmas present from your butcher.

It’s a good enough movie that kills a bit of time but with Tom Hardy putting in a hybrid performance of wounded and coiled brilliance pitted against James Gandolfini’s final bow which although not his best work (last year’s “Enough Said” would argue as a better swan song.) did remind me of the latter Sopranos seasons, never a bad thing. It’s just a shame they couldn’t have fleshed it out a tad more, some of the aforementioned twists just seemed telegraphed and tacked on. Ultimately it’s no knockout but definitely worth seeing a few rounds in with.

3.5/5

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