A GROTESQUE, INGLORIOUS LOOK AT CAPONE'S LAST YEAR

Al Capone lived out his final years on a grand estate in Palm Island, Florida, with his wife, Mae, by his side and grandchildren running around the property.

- 

It sounds like a pretty nice end for the notorious Chicago gangster, until you realize that he spent those post Alcatraz years suffering from declining health, dementia and the longterm effects of a syphilis infection from when he was just a teenager that went untreated. Also? He was likely broke. Then he died of a heart attack on January 25, 1947. He was only 48.

It’s this chapter that gets the focus in “Capone,” a hallucinatory and messy (in all respects) film starring Tom Hardy as the once great crime boss who is now hardly recognizable to himself or his family and in a state of rapid decline.

With ashen skin, blood-red eyes and a voice that is so raspy as to be almost unintelligible, Hardy’s Capone looks like a drawing of a comic book gangster that’s gone too far.