I haven’t been as excited to see a movie as I was to see Drop in possibly years. I saw the trailer a couple of months ago at the beginning of some other movie I don’t remember, and this is how the trailer goes: Ginormous house. Warm lighting. A little R&B. Meghann Fahy. “It’s just a date.” A soft halcyon vignette you know can only be prologue to a massive shitshow. Fahy leaves her cute kid with her cute kid sister at home, and now she’s wearing too much makeup and looking up at a ginormous skyscraper. The restaurant at the top of it, also ginormous, is a golden room with glowing orbs for lights and wrap-around windows overlooking a glowing city. Everything here looks like it costs $9 million. R&B picks up. A bargain-bin Indiana Jones (Brandon Sklenar, and no I don’t know who he is either) waves at her. Her date. Lame banter (“Sorry, I got a drink because I was nervous.” “I had a couple in the car on the way over.” Hahahaha.) Then. The titular drop.
Fahy’s phone buzzes, the music degrades, she starts getting AirDrops left and right, and she and Indiana Jones can’t figure out who it is. Then the music takes another dive because the AirDropper has told her to look at her security cameras and she goes from room to room until she finally sees him: THE MASKED MAN IN HER HOUSE. THIS MAN WILL LITERALLY KILL HER CUTE CHILD—THE AIRDROPPER USES CAPS A LOT—UNLESS SHE DOES ONE THING: KILL HER DATE. I mean, I’ll do it.
Who would not want to see this movie?! It’s basically every '90s action thriller!!! Think Speed, where the bus will blow up if Sandra Bullock doesn’t keep it above 50 miles per hour while flirting with Keanu Reeves! Think The Fugitive, where Harrison Ford is living on borrowed time trying to find Sela Ward’s real killer! Think Nick of Time, where Johnny Depp has to assassinate a politician in his slutty little glasses, or his daughter will die! Think of countless famous stars running to beat the clock and save someone’s life and by extension their own!
Articles upon articles dating back more than a decade have addressed the death of the mid-budget movie, which is the term industry people use for these films, instead of “awesome.” These are movies that cost somewhere under $50 million and are more character-driven and adult-oriented, which sounds pornographic, and compared to the kind of G-rated shit studios are putting out, they kind of are. “All of the major studios are now owned by huge media conglomerates that include merchandising, TV, publishing and, sometimes, theme parks,” Dorothy Pomerantz wrote at Forbes in 2012. “It makes business sense for the studios to focus as much energy and money as possible on the biggest films that will generate the most revenue down the line.” As Jason Bailey wrote at Flavorwire two years later, “Movies that don’t fit into that box (thoughtful dramas, dark comedies, oddball thrillers, experimental efforts) were relegated to the indies, where freedom is greater, but resources are far more limited.”
No, Drop is not oddball. But it shows how bad things have gotten a decade on that even it has to be an indie movie. Drop cost around $10 million and was produced by Blumhouse, the production company that belongs to Jason Blum, who has made it his job to be a kind of mid-budget savior, though he’s known more for his horror films (Happy Death Day, where the character keeps reliving her murder over and over, is the most comparable here, and maybe why director Christopher Landon was hired for Drop). Steven Soderbergh has also done a good job of keeping the mid-budget market on life support. Black Bag, his latest, is a $50 million film about a couple of spies who also happen to be a couple, though Drop is more reminiscent of his 2022 on-the-run techno thriller Kimi, a direct-to-streamer starring Zoë Kravitz.
Drop is all right. It doesn’t suck. It’s not boring (well, the girl next to me was on her phone the whole time so maybe it kind of was). It doesn’t look like it should have gone straight to streaming, anyway. I knew I’d built up this movie too much going in, but I was still surprised by how disappointing it was. Fahy really just isn’t given enough to do. Within the confines of the story—in which an all-seeing eye she cannot pin down is watching her every move, ever ready to pull the trigger—she is confined to basically doing nothing. She’s like the opposite of Bruce Willis in Die Hard. The fact that she cannot tell her wet-noodle date, or the beautiful bartender she should really be dating, or the guy who is waiting for his sister who she thinks might be the mastermind, or literally anyone else in this populated restaurant means she basically just … sits there. Drop curses itself to spinning its wheels, and not even that fast. And its two big heroine moments come too late to make up for it. The audience cheered, though, so maybe I’m just an asshole.
I’ll say this: When I think of the '90s thrillers I mentioned above, they do vary, but they are consistent in a handful of important ways. They always have an extremely charismatic star (yes, Depp was charismatic at one point). And they weren’t always men—Ashley Judd was a big '90s thriller gal (in fact my favorite '90s thriller gal), just like Bullock. And I’m not saying Fahy isn’t a great actress—she broke out of The White Lotus for a reason—but she’s known more for her subtlety. Thrillers like this need big acting, big like Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57. You need to be able to command a plane. They also need chemistry. Reeves leaning over Bullock at the wheel of a bus is hotter than the actual kiss between Fahy and Sklenar in Drop. Not that the chemistry has to be sexual. Judd and Morgan Freeman in Kiss the Girls, Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive—there’s crackle, if not spark. Fahy had more chemistry with Aubrey Plaza in The White Lotus. The other thing is the foil has to be fallible. In these films, the heroes may be smart, but they aren’t geniuses necessarily, it’s just that the bad guys are not all powerful. Remember how in Speed they’re able to trick a batshit Dennis Hopper by looping the security footage on the bus, so that they can get people off it without him seeing? In Drop, the bad guy is so in control that it’s like the cat already paralyzed the mouse before the game even started.
That’s not so much the actors’ fault, though. That’s more of a script problem. And the Drop script is a problem. It’s just not that strong, neither the dialogue nor the story itself. And with that little movement on screen, you at least need some good one-liners (the waiter, played by a very game Jeffery Self, bless his soul, does try). There’s a reason Shane Black was so famous in the '80s and '90s: He could write action, but it was his dialogue, it was the way he wrote his scripts that made them so pricey (and the fact that he’s a guy). There is no equivalent to “I am too old for this shit” in Drop. Nor is there a dam jump, a jumping bus, or any other kind of crazy set piece to build toward. When Fahy falls out of the window, it happens like everything else in the film: like just … kind of ... whatever. There is no real momentum. I don’t know whose fault that is. It’s not like Landon doesn’t know how to direct. Happy Death Day was fun!
Like Drop, I have no grand conclusion. Nothing I say can’t be said by the fact that the trailers in front of the film were for the live-action How to Train Your Dragon, Jurassic Park Part 3000 and The Bad Guys 2 (I don’t even know what this is—oh it’s based on a children’s book by an Australian man named Aaron Blabey). Obviously, the fact that there are so few mid-budget films means I am loading too much onto the ones that are around, which means poor Drop has to carry the weight. More than anything else I can’t stop thinking about the hippie I met at a small, improvised jazz concert last week, who was about my age but had never heard of Sneakers, the 1992 thriller about a bunch of busted security specialists led by Robert Redford. He wrote it down in his little diary, flipping past a page with his baby’s footprint on it. He gets to watch that film for the first time, like it’s 1992 all over again. He's probably watching it right now, that little kid next to him, and I have never been so jealous of anyone in my entire life.
