SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Poorly structured, frequently incoherent and a little dull, Josh Trank’s Capone relies solely on Tom Hardy, who delivers an oddly mesmerising performance capable of keeping an audience’s attention.
At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Capone was some kind of biopic-slash-crime epic. The image of charismatic crime bosses and behatted gangsters wielding tommy guns is practically contained within the name; synonymous with a monolithic figure in the history of organised crime in the United States. But with this film, director Josh Trank tries to offer us something else entirely: a portrait of a powerful man in his twilight years, battling disease and personal demons, and paying the price for a life of crime. But Trank’s film doesn’t match his ambition, despite having Tom Hardy on side to deliver a mesmerising performance as a man who was once king. It’s frequently incoherent, and often ugly without purpose, rather than being both stylish and substantial.
Set in the final year of the life of notorious gangster Al Capone, Trank’s film aims to chronicle his subject’s descent into syphilis-induced dementia following a lengthy stint in prison for income tax evasion. It’s not what you might expect, but at the very least, Trank succeeds at showing us why a film focusing on Capone’s final days wouldn’t be a bad idea. As disease eats away at Capone’s mind, it becomes far less clear what’s real and what’s not, and it’s made all the worse by his violent past and the demons in his head. It might have been something of a fascinating character study, and a convincing way to deglamourize criminals by depicting the true ugliness of the lives some prominent gangsters must lead.
But Trank’s film is, for all intents and purposes, entirely pointless. Capone leaves very little to the imagination and earns its R rating by showing its title character’s gradual transformation into a zombie-like figure who soils himself no less than three times, and has gruesome nightmares of dead children riddled with bullets and men carving their own eyes out, but to what end? As it shows us, the FBI are still watching the man, since he’s hidden a lot of money that they and others want to recover, but it never gets found since Capone is barely coherent and can’t remember where it is, so the movie just fizzles out. Similarly, there’s a whole subplot about his relationship with his secret son, but nothing comes of that either. We’re stuck watching Capone suffer and his world gradually collapsing around him, but it’s very much style over substance. There are some great shots, but the film fails at the most fundamental task of any biopic: to offer valuable insight on the lives of its subjects.
The movie coasts. It wants to show the ugly horror of Capone’s final days as he drifts between reality and hallucinations caused by his dementia, but Trank has structured the film in such a way that the audience somehow has less idea about what’s happening than a sick man with the mental capacity of a child. Something feels permanently off about the whole affair: a scene in which Capone relives watching one of his henchmen gruesomely stab a man to death seems to involve cranberry juice instead of blood, and it’s symbolic of a film that’s more off-putting and grotesque than properly intense. The plot and pacing are utterly mangled to the point that I still had no idea who most of the characters actually were, apart from Hardy’s Capone and Linda Cardellini who plays Capone’s wife Mae, by the time the credits rolled. Did they have names? Are they family? Associates? Both?
Tom Hardy does his best in the title role, but truth be told, I’m still not sure if his performance is brilliant, awful, or somehow a bit of both at the same time. Regardless, he’s the centrepiece: an oddly mesmerising presence that keeps you watching even though this isn’t a good film by any stretch of the imagination. His acting is rather method, and once again he has something in his mouth that stops him from talking properly: in this case a cigar, and later after his doctor intervenes, a carrot. Does he know the difference? It’s not clear. Regardless, half the time he speaks, it’s an unintelligible growl, made all the more disturbing by the fact that you’re not sure if that’s intentional. Occasionally, we get a glimpse of the ferocious gangster he used to be, but far more often, it’s a struggle not to laugh in disbelief at the sight of a sick man waddling around in a loaded diaper, wielding a gold-plated tommy gun and falling backwards into a pond from recoil. You probably shouldn’t laugh at that: it’s objectively unfunny after all, but you can never quite shake the feeling that Hardy might just be trying to have a laugh.
This film is bizarre, to say the least: a victim of poor writing that takes something that sounds intriguing on paper and renders it totally hollow. Hardy’s performance in the lead role is about the only positive point in its favour, and I’m still not totally sure that it really counts as a positive to be honest. Aside from that, it’s actually a pretty dull affair and I’m not at all surprised that the executives decided to forego the theatrical release. If you have nothing else to do and fancy watching Tom Hardy act in a film that works better as a warning about the dangers of unprotected sex than a biopic, then by all means give this a try.
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