REVIEW: Like the real thing, 'Capone' feels fractured and inconclusive
Tom Hardy as the titular gangster in Capone, written and directed by Josh Trank.
There’s a scene in Capone where Tom Hardy, with a furrowed-brow scowl that his become very much his trademark, picks up a gold-plated Tommy gun and lays waste to everyone on his estate. It’s a shocking violent scene in the final moments of Josh Trank’s new biopic about the Prohibition-era gangster, but he quickly pulls off the hood and reveals that the only damage Capone has dealt is a flesh wound in the leg to just one person, his mental and physical health betraying him again during a lengthy battle against neurosyphilis.
Capone is replete with these kinds of scenes, in which Capone routinely questions his own sanity. The movie is buoyed further by Hardy’s animated performance, numerous flashbacks and a mysterious lieutenant named Johnny (Matt Dillon) who is tasked with finding Capone’s hidden fortune, after a tax evasion conviction renders the family near-penniless. Despite its relatively short 104-minute runtime, nearly all of it is dedicated to watching Capone soil himself or chew his cigar.
Trank’s Hollywood career is well-documented, going from celebrated hot shot thanks to Chronicle, to persona non grata after Fantastic Four became a commercial and critical bomb, and a falling-out with Disney after being handed a piece of the Star Wars franchise. What keeps Trank coming back, however, is his ability to craft some really great scenes. Dark, moody and – at times – self-destructive, it feels like Capone’s material speaks to Trank’s personality and career in a personal way, but much like his other projects, it never quite comes together with an overarching big idea.
There is little connective tissue tying all of Capone’s scenes together. What we’re left with is a depiction of the messy yet devoted relationship between Capone and his wife, Mae (Linda Cardellini, who seems to be forever cast as the dutiful housewife), some imagery involving Florida swamps and coming face to face with alligators, the region’s apex predator, and more than a few emotional outbursts of unintelligible shouting and herky-jerky body movements that Hardy delivers with quite a bit of relish.
The most compelling subplots, that of Capone and Johnny’s (and the FBI’s) quest to find the cash that he had hidden away and his relationship with an estranged son looking to reconnect, are offered piecemeal and no real conclusion is really offered. Like Capone’s final days, the film just slowly dies without really saying much of anything.
Perhaps the most interesting note is Hardy’s performance, which I will affectionately describe as “grumblecore”, and not because the film is like anything about an overzealous smart aleck from suburban America, but because only Hardy can grumble through his lines without losing any sense of the hardcore edginess he has brought to the innumerable tough guys he has portrayed, from Charles Bronson to Mad Max to Bane. He is perhaps the only actor who says more by grunting than speaking.
Released on video-on-demand after the pandemic curtailed its theatrical release, Capone managed to break records, but the bar isn’t really high and we are just on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how new content can reach its audience. On a reported budget of just over $20 million and seemingly unlikely to generate a profit, if any, it may be a blessing that this somewhat forgettable film didn’t get the harsher spotlight of having a theatrical release, especially one that carries some of Trank’s baggage, and that he’s allowed a little more time to get back on track.
Capone gets two and a half stars out of four.
