Capone Movie Review

Tom Hardy is a great actor. He’s always ready to do something crazy on screen, and often that pays off (see Bronson). In Capone, he plays the crime lord in his last days. He loses control of his bladder and bowels, soils himself multiple times, and is prone to hallucinations.

A Mumblecore Movie

Tom Hardy is as feral as he could be as the mobster known as Capone in Josh Trank’s wild movie. It’s a crime drama about the withering crime lord in the final years of his life, living out his days in a Florida mansion under surveillance from the Feds and losing his mind to neurosyphilis. The film’s plot-hook is a $10 million stash that the gangster supposedly hid but can’t remember where, and there are scenes in which government agents, including Trank, interview him.

However, if there is one thing that mumblecore, the genre that this pelispedia film belongs to, has in common with mainstream Hollywood movies, it’s how sexist they treat women. Molly, the woman who falls for John Greenberg, is an alcoholic with nothing going for her and yet she chooses to spend her nights in bed with him. It’s absurd and sexist, even by mumblecore standards. Moreover, the lingering horror elements of the movie never really land.

A Biopic

A karmic fever dream about the mobster legend in his declining years, Capone is an uneasy mix of standard biopic conventions and delirious fantasy. It’s not helped that Tom Hardy – under caked-on makeup and a bad wig – grumbles incomprehensibly and sounds like a man possessed. Josh Trank’s script tries to give Capone some depth by interspersing his hallucinations with flashbacks of him during his Prohibition-era glory days. But these moments are fleeting, and the movie never settles into a satisfying rhythm.

Hardy’s performance is captivating as the crime lord in his last gasps of power, and he convincingly conveys the erratic, violent incoherence that was Capone’s trademark. But the film is often a mess of disconnected tangents (the scene in which he interviews with federal agents and then soils himself, for instance) and sloppy storytelling. It’s a fascinating subject, but it’s a movie that deserves better. Especially from a director of Trank’s pedigree.

A Gangster Movie

When it comes to the genre of gangster movies, Capone falls somewhere between the kind that satisfies and the sort that disappoints. The picture focuses on the last year of notorious mobster Al Capone’s life, and while it could have been a simple biopic, writer/director Josh Trank (Fantastic Four) injects his film with an imaginative out-thereness that’s largely driven by Tom Hardy’s tremendous, transformative performance.

Unlike his usual work, the Oscar-nominated actor takes on the role of a shuffling incontinent gangster with dementia, whose fading mind is full of flashbacks and recurring images of his violent past. He stumbles around his florid estate in a dressing gown and adult diapers, soiling himself as he goes, while shouting at his gardeners or a doting wife (Linda Cardellini) or a crooked doctor (Noel Fisher). His eyes are red like a vampire’s, and he’s visited by apparitions from his shady past. At times, it’s not clear whether he’s dreaming or not.

A Horror Movie

Tom Hardy drools, soils himself and shouts gibberish in Capone, but it’s his performance that makes the movie. His transformation from crime lord to crazed invalid is astounding. The film is not a clip show, as some critics have claimed, but rather an exploration of an aging criminal’s demise.

Capone doesn’t rely on gangster film cliches, except for the occasional flashback to bootlegging or the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. Instead, most of the film is set inside the decaying mobster’s Florida mansion, where he wanders in a robe and has visions and hallucinations that make him think he is being stalked by federal agents or engaged in bloody armed rampages.

It’s a remarkable and unnerving portrayal, and one that should give pause to anyone who believes a biopic needs to have a happy ending. Capone is not a great film, but it is a memorable and unconventional one that proves Josh Trank can still be an inventive filmmaker after the lumbering disaster of Fantastic Four.