It’s a bit of a tough break for writer/director Josh Trank, who seems to keep taking loss after loss, that his “comeback” movie “Capone” has the misfortune of arriving in the shadow of Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman.” Both films utilize the last days of an aging mobster as their narrative backbone, then again, it’s unlikely many will compare the two films on their merits. While Scorsese utilizes Frank Sheeran hanging on the brink of death to explore morality and mortality in the gangster genre, what Trank has to say about a similar era in a dying man’s life is more nightmarish fever-dream clouded by paranoia and dread. The time frame, and accompanying dementia it brings courtesy of the titular mobster’s syphilitic state, unfortunately, represents what feels like little more than an excuse for Trank to stage puerile gangster fantasy sequences and write them off as existing only in his protagonist’s mind.
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The movie can go anywhere while the corpulent Capone, embodied here by Tom Hardy, rots away physically and mentally in Florida during his final year of life. And yet, it’s still largely leaden. “Capone” is little more than a collection of tangents and diversions that never coheres into any kind of compelling narrative. The only real propulsion the film sustains is the sheer force of Hardy’s performance as his character further loses control of his mind and bowels (there’s a lot of the incontinent protagonist shitting himself, some of it for bizarre laughs, but none of which really land that well).
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Grand Guignol does not even begin to describe what Hardy is doing here as the aging Al Capone. He’s swinging for the fences on every pitch the movie throws him from appearance to accent, movement to mannerism. Hardy can make a memorable scene out of shoveling spaghetti down his gullet and even manages to find a way to make his mush-mouthed Italian sound as sinister as Parseltongue from “Harry Potter.” His gonzo, gravel-voiced interpretation of the decaying gangster is one of towering effort. That’s a problem, though, when the movie surrounding him maintains an unblinking pose of seriousness. Sure, there’s surreal dark humor too, but the tone is so strange, it’s going to be imperceptible to most audiences.
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The rest of the talented cast of “Capone” (Linda Cardellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Matt Dillon, Jack Lowden) simply cannot match his intensity because Hardy is performing as if he’s in a different movie (a problem that disfigures a lot of Tom Hardy movies). His Capone reads like a farce of a mafioso, almost as if he wandered in from a “Saturday Night Live” parody of Johnny Depp’s performance in “Black Mass.” Hardy turns his cast into unwilling straight men for his routine, such as during a tense interview with FBI agents that ends with Capone loudly farting and defecating himself.
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Hardy’s over-the-top performance practically demands to be seen in order to be believed, but that would also entail sitting through a movie with nearly compelling freaky, surreal dream sequences that sadly have little-to-no narrative drive. “Capone” runs through clichés at breakneck speed; Capone witnessing the specter of his childhood self in an early scene in the film immediately portends doom. The film might at least be morbidly entertaining if Trank at least leaned into the bombast of his leading man. By not leaning into the joke, and acting more aloof, “Capone” becomes a strange gag itself. (If only Hardy’s raspy, croaking vocals were not so central to the unintentionally comedic appeal of the film, the film could have become a sensation through GIFs on the internet.)
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If things keep going the way they are, Tom Hardy seems fated to inherit the mantle of his generation’s Nicolas Cage. That’s not necessarily the worst thing; lest we forget, Cage has an Academy Award on his mantle. But between 2018’s “Venom” and now “Capone,” Hardy’s on a roll with bonkers performances that are so big as to become deeply incongruous with the movies they are nestled inside. He’s proven himself a brilliant performer with the ability to channel the conflicts and contradictions of machismo. But if he cannot figure out a way to dial into the frequency of his directors, people will stop seeing a master performer at work. They’ll just see a meme. [C-]
“Capone” is available now on VOD channels via Vertical Entertainment.