First we lost Pierce and Garnett to Brooklyn and now we’ve lost the setting for “The Drop” to that city as well. Revered Boston crime novelist Dennis Lehane’s screenplay for “The Drop” (his first endeavor as a cinematic scribe) was based on “Animal Rescue,” a short story he wrote ten years ago and set in Boston. For “The Drop,” which opens today, he transposed the locale to Brooklyn, purportedly because the author wanted to stretch his wings and try out some new turf. In addition, Lehane just turned “The Drop’s” screenplay into a similarly titled novel.
So, just to make sure that we’re all on the same page, it’s a book, based on a screenplay, based on a short story. Got it?
Lehane himself, on the heels of the successful screen adaptations of his crime novels, “Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone” and “Shutter Island,” has departed Boston for L.A. to be closer to the biz. It’s an understandable move, but not free of the ironic shadows of “Beat L.A.”(which Pierce and Garnett did) and the same migratory path of ignominious Boston crime boss, Whitey Bulger.
Brooklyn, as “The Drop” has it, is a dark, dingy place where hard-working people and shady mobsters intersect with plenty of crossover. One such middler is the affable, yet gruff Marv (played by the late James Gandolfini), who runs a bar, tagged Cousin Marv’s. Marv used to own the bar, but the Chechen mob took over to create a cash drop. A quick montage depicts illicit greenbacks on the move, slipping through a secret slot in the bar top during business hours and later, after closing, then getting sealed into a Trojan keg of sorts and shipped off to be laundered—or something like that. Continue reading
That premise might sound silly, and it’s hard not to think of Putin and the Russia of the moment, though there’s never any mention of the notorious president (the film’s based on Bill Granger’s 1986 book “There Are No Spies,” which clung to Cold War fumes). That aside, as a straight-up spy thriller, “The November Man” does offer fierce and feverishly paced rewards. The rub is that Devereaux happens to have loved the double agent in question (with whom he has a 12-year-old daughter – and a cafe on Lake Geneva – that none of the folks running the machine know of) and that causes his handlers some concern, so they assign Devereaux’s former protégé, a young can-do field operative by the name of Mason (a hunky yet generic Luke Bracey) the task of cleaning up the stink Devereaux is stirring up in Belgrade. 
Like its predecessor, “A Dame to Kill For” is broken into four segments. Interestingly, the character of Dwight, which was played by Clive Owen in 2005, is played here by Josh Brolin and Miho, the lethal blade-wielding assassin from Old Town originally played by Devon Aoki is updated by Jamie Chung (“Sucker Punch”). The other players remain, including Mickey Rourke as Marv, the pulp-prose-spouting strong man with an iron jaw, Jessica Alba as the troubled object of desire, Nancy, and Powers Boothe as the corrupt and ruthless Senator Roark, whose family seeded Sin City (Basin City, but the “Ba” is X-ed out) with the pillars of ill repute back in the day to draw a dollar from those settling out west. The use of Rodriguez’s rich black and white photog helps mask some of those nine years in between.
Old-school old guys schooling buff newbies with plenty of tongue-in-cheek ha-has was the way of the first films. “Expendables 3” starts off that way, somewhere in a Baltic/Eastern Bloc country with Barney Ross (Stallone), the series quarterback of a covert military ops group, springing an old colleague (Wesley Snipes) amid great, witty barbs about “tax evasion” and “blades.” Then it’s onto Mogadishu, where Barney and crew go on a routine mission to stop an arms trade and get their asses handed to them. The fly in the ointment, and adding to the heavy list of new names, is Mel Gibson as Conrad Stonebanks, who’s as bad-assed as the whole Expendables crew and arguably the dark side of Gibson’s already certifiable Riggs persona from the “Lethal Weapon” franchise.
“Storm” is a humble effort with the budget of “Sharknado” and the big-screen aspirations of “Twister.” Even bolstered by a meaty budget, that 1996 film was no masterpiece, but it had masterful thespians Helen Hunt and Philip Seymour Hoffman in the cast, and flying cows. It also had well regarded cinematographer Jan de Bont (he shot “Die Hard” and “Basic Instinct”) taking the reins (his prior effort was “Speed”), which in a way ties us back to “Storm”: Director Steven Quale has toiled as second unit director on James Cameron projects. He might not quite have his hands around sculpting a full-bodied drama just yet, but the one thing he clearly does know are FX. The rendering of the massive twisters – one a flaming tornado – is vivid and viscerally done. As far as character and plot, that’s pretty much the eternal overcast sky while sitting in a steel-plated storm-chasing vehicle hoping for lightning and mayhem to strike.
For What it's Worth 