In The Untouchables, Bobby De Niro’s Al Capone could make you figuratively shit your pants. Tom Hardy’s Capone, on the other hand, literally soils his own pants. In the Godfather, Don Vito Corleone leaves, through Luca Brassi, a horse’s head on Jack Woltz’s bed. In Capone, the only thing the titular character leaves in a bed, which happens to be, once again, his own, is his dinner — after he has digested it. I know comparisons are odious, but then this movie would suck even without measuring it up against the classics of the genre.
This film is arguably the second lowest point in the Al Capone mythos, the absolute nadir being of course The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault — and not unlike Geraldo Rivera, Capone purports to give us access to the vault that was the mobster’s psyche during his last days (the events of the movie take place during Al Capone’s final year on Earth, when the notorious criminal was “no longer considered a threat” to anyone or anything other than his underwear or a clean set of bed sheets), and the result is equally disappointing.
On paper no movie should be truly bad that includes Hardy (or at least the Tom Hardy I remember from The Revenant), Kyle MacLachlan and Matt Dillon, but Capone gives them very little to do. MacLachlan looks as if he got lost on his way to the Twin Peaks set, Dillon wastes his considerable talent on some sort of Sixth Sense-esque routine, and Hardy spends the entire film wearing a prosthetic mask that covers the entire surface of his face and skull, making him look like Michael Myers in Halloween 3000: Massacre at the Old Folks Home.
The worst part of the whole thing is that most of the plot unfolds solely in the protagonist’s feverish, senile mind, and while there’s nothing wrong with a film that reflects the deteriorated mental state of a character (e.g., The Machinist), my problem is that director/writer Josh Trank has no way of knowing what was going on in Al Capone’s head during his last days of life; in other words, he’s making this shit up as he goes, and this burdens the film with a double layer of unreality.
Put another way, we are dealing with not one, but two levels of fantasy; there’s the character’s ravings, and then there’s the filmmaker’s musings as to what the actual person’s ravings might have been. We cannot expect to gain any new insights from this approach, and indeed the film fails to reveal anything important or relevant about its subject.
90% of Everything is Crap 