It backs Hardy up with a regulation supporting cast, including Linda Cardellini as Capone’s weary wife, Kyle MacLachlan as a Mob doctor, and Jack Lowden as an FBI agent called Crawford. Making a few half-hearted gestures in these directions, Capone is a far more uncertain and botched job. Even the more fitful Bronson (2008), which might now be called the first in Hardy’s “Psycho Hoodlum Trilogy”, used vaudeville stylings to keep its hero trapped in the spotlight – but made sure that the only true audience for him was the camera. In zeroing in on an ignoble endgame, Trank’s film presumably wanted to fit into the “last days” subgenre of biopics, such as, well, Last Days (2005), Gus Van Sant’s thinly disguised portrait of Kurt Cobain shambling around, or Alexander Sokurov’s brilliant The Sun (also 2005), about the eerie isolation of Emperor Hirohito in the dying days of the Second World War.īoth those films were hypnotically weird and worked: committing, for one thing, to a minimal cast, they stripped all hubbub away and left a spacey echo around those infamous lives. The film’s problem, or its daring, depending on your point of view, is that there wasn’t much left of Capone’s life by these later stages, except a gruesome slide into a grimly diminished mental state marked by childlike behaviour and frequent lapses of bowel control. It scarcely bothers with his Prohibition glory days, except in the odd bitty flashback not at all with the grand jury indictment you may remember from The Untouchables (1987) still less that ensuing decade in the clink. It’s only at this point that Josh Trank’s film – which was shot in early 2018, was released in America last year and is only now reaching Britain – checks in on Capone. The authorities assumed he was no longer a public threat, and let him out to subside into a cushy retirement surrounded by his family in the Florida Keys, albeit under federal watch in case he got back up to any of his notorious tricks. Next to what Hardy makes of Capone here, that film’s gurgling, rancid and overacted portrait of Ronnie Kray starts to look like a dainty watercolour sketch.Īt the age of 40, Chicago’s most notorious gangster was released after his near-10-year stint for tax evasion, having spent the last year of that sentence in the hospital ward of Alcatraz, his brain rotting away. 18 cert, 103 minsĬapone takes you back – not particularly to the Florida of the 1940s, where Al Capone lived out his last syphilitic years, but to the autumn of 2015, when Tom Hardy starred in Legend, his double-duty biopic of the Kray twins. Cast: Tom Hardy, Linda Cardellini, Matt Dillon, Jack Lowden, Noel Fisher, Kyle MacLachlan.
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