Director: Josh Trank
Starring: Tom Hardy
Year: 2020
Capone is a cross between Godfather 3 and Wild Things; yes, it’s that bad. Ask yourself the question the filmmaking team should have asked themselves before making this movie; will it make for solid cinema to depict the last, grotesque year of a famous person’s life, a year in which they mostly sat down, grunting & shitting themselves, until they died of syphilitic insanity? No, no by god, no it will not. Tom Hardy is one of our greatest actors, Al Capone is one of our most infamous real-life villains, entertainment/intrigue awaits around every corner where these two are involved, and yet all we get is Hardy pooping his diapers and hallucinating for an hour and forty-five minutes. Again, yes it’s that bad.
Al Capone, the famous mobster, went to prison at the age of 33, was released for failing health at the age of 40, and died when he was 48. This is a depiction of the last days of his life, as his empire fell crumbling around him, a venereal disease wracked his body, and death stalked the halls of his Florida mansion. Beset by paranoid delusions and mental impairments, Capone needed more & more care from his family, and took a role in his businesses less & less. The inevitable final curtain was near, and the march toward death was disgusting, but the grim reaper comes for every man, rich or poor, mighty or frail, and the end is always the same.
Josh Trank has directed Chronicle, Fantastic Four, and Capone; that’s it. You start with a cool, interesting superhero film, you tank with a reboot that doesn’t work, so you decide to do Al Capone? OK, maybe, but specifically Al Capone in a wheel chair, unable to speak or eat or form coherent expressions? On what planet was that a good idea?! In what world was that something we needed to see?! To call this film an abomination would be too kind; it’s a mistake that should have been deleted from the universe the instant it was brainstormed. Tom Hardy is a tremendous actor, obviously, and maybe there’s a story here somewhere, if you start with success and end with decomposition, maybe, somewhere. Capone was in his 40s when he died, he was an evil god who got too close to the fiery sun, that’s an angle. But this film, this crud, was much more simple; let’s show the guy slowly breaking down until there’s nothing left, audiences will love that. Well, no, we won’t, and if the goal was to punish someone notorious, powerful, and bad, you only succeeded in making us hate you, not him.
My rating: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆