It does its job with a minimum of fuss, the acting is stellar, the tensions crackle, and the plot holes are left to take care of themselves.
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
The presence of Robert De Niro, Edward Norton, Marlon Brando, and Angela Bassett alone helps this heist picture to score. How often do we get to see three generations of actors working together, often improvising, in a drama that emphasizes character relationships as much as it does story machinations? "The Score" may not be the most original crime flick ever made, but it wasn´t meant to be. It´s supposed to remind us of the classic caper movies of old, "Rififi," "Topkapi," that sort of thing, while adding a whole lot of high-tech twists of its own. It does its job with a minimum of fuss, the acting is stellar, the tensions crackle, and the plot holes are left to take care of themselves.
I´m not sure what the fascination is for gentleman crooks, but they´ve been around and delighting us for quite a while. De Niro fits right in with the likes of Cary Grant ("To Catch a Thief"), David Niven ("The Pink Panther"), Frank Sinatra and George Clooney ("Ocean´s 11" and "Ocean´s Eleven"), Sean Connery ("Entrapment"), and dozens of others from Louis Hayward and George Sanders to Brad Pitt and Roger Moore. In "The Score" De Niro plays Nick, a highly successful, middle-aged safecracker whose front is owning a jazz club in Montreal. Angela Bassett plays his girlfriend, Diane, an airline stewardess, who wants him to settle down. What with his hopping from country to country cracking safes and her flying from country to country with the airline, they hardly see each other. He agrees with her but decides to do one last big job before retiring to his night club full time.
Brando, looking more like Sydney Greenstreet by the day, plays Max, the ringleader and fence of the theft operations. He tells Nick of a priceless scepter being stored in the Montreal Customs House, just waiting to be stolen, with Nick´s cut about $6,000,000. Norton plays Jack, the inside man, a supposedly retarded night janitor at the Customs House who has blueprints of the whole place and ambitions of his own. He´s young and seemingly reckless, and Nick doesn´t trust him; but the money´s right, so Nick goes for it.
Like all good heist pictures, this one fashions its suspense slowly after a patient buildup, with the usual unanticipated complications arising along the way, like extra security in the Customs House basement, a newfangled, tamperproof safe, and local gangsters suddenly entering the story. And, of course, there´s the usual array of whiz-bang equipment involved (lasers, computers, video cameras, tracking devices, access codes), the predictably nail-biting climax involving the heist itself, and the inevitable clever ending. You´ll find nothing very inventive about any of this, but it´s all done in so polished and stylish a way, you probably won´t even notice its deficiencies.
Mainly, "The Score" is a character drama, the interrelationships of its participants uppermost in our minds. It´s fascinating to watch old pros Brando and De Niro play off one another, several of their key scenes we´re told on the commentary track coming from improvisations. Not that director Frank Oz ("Dark Crystal," "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels") didn´t have them work from a script, but he says he encouraged the actors to ad lib, too, and filmed numerous variations of their exchanges (several alternatives of which are included among the disc´s bonus items) before deciding on the ones he thought worked best.
Average user rating (1-5):
[release]8837[/release]