If watching a shuffling, scrofulous, incontinent and delusional gangster in terminal decline is your idea of entertainment, “Capone” is what you’ve been waiting for.
Josh Trank’s remarkably unpleasant film portrays Al Capone during the last year of his life. Released from prison and ravaged by syphilis, he is Scarface with boils on his cheeks, human wreckage in a bathrobe. Capone rails at phantoms on his Florida estate, where he has buried $10 million against a rainy day in a place he can’t recall. The legendary thug is played by Tom Hardy, a phenomenal actor whose presence ought to be worth the price of admission; I relished the prospect of seeing him as evil incarnate, elevating Capone’s rages to Shakespearean heights. Mr. Hardy does have a few sensationally lurid moments, but the stuff of high drama isn’t there. Most of the time his character is a minimally animate object, scowling furtively and growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking’s synthesizer.
Read Full Article »