The Score (2001)
Wow, the last half hour is gripping, exciting stuff. The pace quickens, a bunch of conflicts put you on the edge of your seat, and you actually start caring who comes out ahead in the end.
Until then, however, this is a very one-sided heist film. It's supposed to be intriguing because of the mechanics of it. You watch as Robert De Niro and Edward Norton (with the occasional prod from an aging Marlon Brando) plan to steal something worth a lot and heavily guarded. Their motivation is just money, and there is at first a trust issue to solve, but eventually it's all about them figuring out the problem.
And so you don't really worry about it. I was vaguely curious, of course, because some fancy thinking and timing was involved. But unlike the granddaddy of these kinds of heist films, "The Asphalt Jungle," this lacked both the impeccable timing and pace required, but also some convincing characters. Here we have only two. DeNiro is playing himself, basically, and he's good, though he has a girlfriend and a jazz club that makes for nice backdrop but feels patched on. Norton is another story, because he plays young schemer pretending to be mentally disabled. It's disarming and charming.
If you can enjoy the first hour or so and watch the slow building up, and enjoy seeing Brando in a role that seems made for him and little extraneous, you'll eventually get to the heist itself, and it gets complicated and interesting. And intense. At last there is conflict. At last the "good guys" get in on the act, adding tension. And at last the incipient rivalry between the older and younger crook gets going.
The director, Frank Oz, is known mostly for being Miss Piggie and doing other puppeteering stuff over the years. But he's been involved in scores of films and done a lot of directing and this feels well made and shows control if not imagination in the way the story is shown to us. It's more the story itself, a committee affair, that holds it back. And the ideas are mostly well-worn ones from other heist movies (cutting the cameras, getting someone on the inside, discovering infrared beams, getting clever about cracking the safe). But if you have some patience, give it a go. There is a treasure in it somewhere.
Wow, the last half hour is gripping, exciting stuff. The pace quickens, a bunch of conflicts put you on the edge of your seat, and you actually start caring who comes out ahead in the end.
Until then, however, this is a very one-sided heist film. It's supposed to be intriguing because of the mechanics of it. You watch as Robert De Niro and Edward Norton (with the occasional prod from an aging Marlon Brando) plan to steal something worth a lot and heavily guarded. Their motivation is just money, and there is at first a trust issue to solve, but eventually it's all about them figuring out the problem.
And so you don't really worry about it. I was vaguely curious, of course, because some fancy thinking and timing was involved. But unlike the granddaddy of these kinds of heist films, "The Asphalt Jungle," this lacked both the impeccable timing and pace required, but also some convincing characters. Here we have only two. DeNiro is playing himself, basically, and he's good, though he has a girlfriend and a jazz club that makes for nice backdrop but feels patched on. Norton is another story, because he plays young schemer pretending to be mentally disabled. It's disarming and charming.
If you can enjoy the first hour or so and watch the slow building up, and enjoy seeing Brando in a role that seems made for him and little extraneous, you'll eventually get to the heist itself, and it gets complicated and interesting. And intense. At last there is conflict. At last the "good guys" get in on the act, adding tension. And at last the incipient rivalry between the older and younger crook gets going.
The director, Frank Oz, is known mostly for being Miss Piggie and doing other puppeteering stuff over the years. But he's been involved in scores of films and done a lot of directing and this feels well made and shows control if not imagination in the way the story is shown to us. It's more the story itself, a committee affair, that holds it back. And the ideas are mostly well-worn ones from other heist movies (cutting the cameras, getting someone on the inside, discovering infrared beams, getting clever about cracking the safe). But if you have some patience, give it a go. There is a treasure in it somewhere.