Metacritic reviews

Hardy is half of why Capone works. The other is Trank, the wunderkind whose nuanced 2012 superhero movie “Chronicle” showcased tons of potential that then was questioned with the disastrous “Fantastic Four” and the loss of a “Star Wars” film in its aftermath.

It’s all overly theatrical, and not at all concerned with being grounded in reality. And there’s something refreshing about seeing a gangster movie filtered through this sort of lens.

Josh Trank’s somber, small-scale drama is not the guns-blazing Al Capone biopic some gangster movie fans might be expecting, but it’s a curiosity that nevertheless demands a look-see for a fresh take on a crime legend whose most notorious exploits have been retold many times already.

Capone isn’t a knockout comeback, but it’s an undeniably striking and bold endeavor that transcends genre constraints and conventional molds.

Maybe what's most frustrating is how much the movie's deeper themes — morality, mortality, the twilight of power — churn intriguingly at the edges of nearly every scene only to turn toward sentiment, or become merely secondary to its relentless focus on his physical decline. There’s merit, of course, in exploring the good and bad in every man, even one as notorious as this one; Capone, in the end, just settles for ugly.

Capone is definitely an unconventional take on the twilight of a notorious gangster. Alas, it's not an interesting one, although the borderline self-parodying Method madness of Tom Hardy's performance does kind of demand to be seen.

Capone is little more than a collection of tangents and diversions that never coheres into any kind of compelling narrative. The only real propulsion the film sustains is the sheer force of Hardy’s performance as his character further loses control of his mind and bowels.

Hardy’s grotesque performance doesn’t invite any sympathy for the devil, but it hobbles him in a way that renders Scarface human.

Capone has lofty ambitions of being the next great crime drama, but falls short of finding a compelling story about its subject's final days.

It’s potentially fresh and unique material, but from the first scenes through the tone-deaf conclusion, Capone is a noxious film about a noxious man — a gruesome and grotesque viewing experience that tells us nothing new about Capone while rubbing our noses in one detestable scene after another. By the time we get to a typically overblown scene in which a diaper-wearing Capone wields a gold-plated Tommy Gun while on a shooting spree, we surrender.