Film Review — Capone
Josh Trank’s failed gangster comeback sent him into social media exile. It’s not hard to see why.
Struggling with rapidly advancing dementia, the once-ruthless mobster Al Capone is haunted by disturbing visions of his violent past.
★☆☆☆☆
Take The Godfather’s opening wedding scene, David Lynch’s experimental short, What Did Jack Do? and the unhinged, off-kilter humour from something like Happy Gilmour, and what you’ve got is something pretty close to Josh Trank’s Capone.
Yeah. It’s not good.
The life and death of one of America’s most enduring villains is something we’ve seen plenty of times before. I mean, Capone’s fedora alone helped shape the timeless (some would say tasteless) Italian-American gangster stereotype.
Here director Trank, director of 2012’s Chronicle — a highly promising debut he’d follow up with the unforgettably terrible Fantastic Four reboot a few years later — tries to give us something different: a psychological deep dive into the rapidly disintegrating mind of the titular crime lord.
Playing the legendary old rogue himself is Tom Hardy — a national treasure and famously hard-to-discern thespian. Hardy’s performance is odd and pretty hard to judge. An effort has clearly gone into replicating Capone’s unique mannerisms, but the sight and sounds of a dishevelled, nappy-wearing, carrot-instead-of-a-cigar-munching Hardy squawking some muffled Italian swears fails to garner the right reaction.
This wasn’t supposed to be a comedy, right?
There are brief flashes of quality. Capone’s surrealist daydreams revisiting violent past glories tease something actually resembling a journey, only for us to be shot back to reality with one of the movie’s many pee and/or poop scenes. Most of Hardy’s dialogue, come to think of it, is just the sound of him reliving himself in front of his soon-to-be widow, played with admirable conviction by Linda Cardellini.
The gangster genre is a prestigious one with a long history of memorable classic movies. This is not one of them. This ain’t even a cousin.
