After the spectacular failure of his 2015 Fantastic Four reboot, tyro filmmaker Josh Trank pledged to make his next film something personal and unique, completely divorced from the world of superheroes that had catapulted him to fame. His latest film, Capone, may be both of those things, but it is also a confounding mess.
Originally created under the more suitably quirky title Fonzo, Capone stars Tom Hardy as the infamous gangster, but this is no soup to nuts biopic situation Trank has foisted upon us. Instead, the film follows Al Capone in the last years of his life, after being released from jail and suffering heavily from syphilitic dementia. Now, on paper, this isn’t the worst subject to build a film around. Matching the classical bravura of The Untouchables would be a tall order, so exploring Capone at his trough rather than the peak is an inspired touch.
But the way Trank approaches the concept leaves a lot to be desired. Handling the writing, directing and editing himself with cinematography from “Twin Peaks: The Return” DP Peter Deming, Trank attempts to devise a blood-soaked tone poem. He sees the ailing mafioso as a conduit to explore a dreamlike visual language, one where Capone’s delusions are an enhanced, vivid counterpoint to the relative ennui of his ailing stasis. It’s clear from the outset that Trank thought he was really going to melt some brains with this take on the subject, but the final product just doesn’t work.
The core reason behind this lies at Hardy’s feet. This is easily the worst performance in the beloved actor’s admittedly deep reserve of great turns. The movie is built around him in such a way that it lives or dies on whether or not we find Hardy’s Capone to be a compelling, watchable figure. Instead, Hardy’s ever-growing obsession with taking weird risks finally fails him. He is so bad here as to be hilariously misguided. The unconvincing makeup, the awkward voice, the scenery-chewing. He may as well be a villain in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, which would be amazing if Trank had anything useful to say about the genre of gangster movies, but he doesn’t.
For another thing, to achieve an aesthetic where static shots of Capone drooling on himself blend seamlessly into heightened action sequences, it means those “reality” shots need to be hyperstylized and foreboding. But it really just makes them feel laughable. This is, above all else, a feature-length movie about a dying man repeatedly shitting on himself while surrounded by actors doing lazy “Sopranos” bit-player dialogue. That he occasionally gets lost down the back corridor of his own mind for frenetic excursions into genre bombast is only meaningful to the director having fun playing around, not to the viewer forced to actually watch it.
Deming’s cinematography is also a point of contention here, as the use of digital video seems intended to make everything feel extra-real, but instead reduces the proceedings to the kind of over-sharpened, high-definition look so prevalent among short film directors who treat every project like a reel to get a job doing commercials.
The disconnect between the film’s visuals and what those visuals are supposed to mean to an audience leaves everything feeling hollow and pointless, exposing Trank as a guy who parlayed a short video parodying Star Wars into a career. Capone should have been an opportunity for him to show the world how much he’s matured and evolved over this past decade into the limelight, but instead it proves he doesn’t have much to bring to the table.
Sadly, these two back-to-back failures, which might permanently fell other filmmakers, will probably lead him to keep failing upwards, because this industry loves to throw endless chances at young white dudes who think they’re better than Spielberg.
Vertical Entertainment released Capone which is available on VOD now
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