Starring Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini. Rated 14A.

The Drop is generating buzz for being James Gandolfini’s final film, but it’s Brit Tom Hardy who owns it.

The famously versatile star plays Brooklyn bartender Bob Saginowski, a quiet loner who keeps his head down and mixes cocktails at the neighbourhood drinking hole while dirty money gets dropped off and picked up by the Chechen mobsters who run it. At first, you think he’s slow, and then you wonder if he’s just a thug. After he finds a badly beaten pitbull and tries to nurse it back to health, you start to see him as vulnerable, too. But Bob, who lives in the chachka-cluttered home of his deceased parents, has more to him than it appears. And Hardy hands in a stealth performance that’s slow to set up but bears rich rewards.

That’s not to say Gandolfini doesn’t feel right at home as Cousin Marv, a former loan shark who lost the bar that still bears his name to the Chechens. A reckless loser about 100 spots lower in the mob pecking order than Tony Soprano, he starts to get in over his head when two masked lowlifes bust in and steal $5,000 of drop money. His plans to recover it, and the fate of the bar, become subplot, though, to Bob’s extended dog-rescue story. He recruits the help of neighbour Nadia (Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Noomi Rapace, gone next-door), and everything starts to look up until a menacing stranger named Eric (Rust and Bone’s brute Matthias Schoenaerts) shows up to extort money. Between the Chechens, Eric, and a nosy detective, Bob finds himself under increasing pressure from all angles.

Aside from a few brutal moments of the mobsters displaying their muscle, The Drop is more of a character study than a gritty, Lumet-like crime thriller. On the latter front, it’s too slow and methodical establishing its players, and in its early going, Mystic River screenwriter Dennis Lehane’s script feels formulaic. Marco Beltrami’s heavy-handed score doesn’t help.

Still, stick with this one: helmed by breakout Belgian director Michäel R. Roskam (Bullhead), it does live up to its talent in the final act. As in the transactions that take place in the unassuming dark, wood-panelled corners of Brooklyn The Drop inhabits, there’s more going on here than you at first think.