The Score

Frank Oz, long-standing Muppeteer and director of Little Shop Of Horrors, is not a name one thinks of when it comes to crime thrillers but he does an excellent job  with this tense heist thriller.

Robert DeNiro is Nick, an aging career criminal who is pulling off  the last big job so that he can retire with his lady-love (Angela Bassett) and a laid-back life running his Montreal jazz club.  He has been given the job by his long term partner Max (Marlon Brando) who has brought on board a hot-shot young crim Jack (Edward Norton). The job is to steal a 17th century sceptre from a high-security safe in the basement of the Montreal Customs House.

Screenwriters Kario Salem, Lem Dobbs, and Scott Marshall Smith have fashioned a reasonably swallowable story (the only major question is over why Jack happened to be working at the Customs House in the first place) that hybridizes elements of Michael Mann’s Heat with a Mission Impossible-style snatch that depends on devices such as the IT wiz who can hack into the security mainframe and a panoply of hi-tech gadgetry whilst Oz keeps the pace ratcheting up to a clever finale and Howard Shore’s score adds to the quality of the production.

Although apparently the part of Max was written for Brando he does not distinguish himself other thatn by his sizew (indeed he is barely recognizable in what turned out to be his final film).  DeNiro has, of course, played this kind of part many times before but he does it well whilst Norton with his boyish looks but intense energy adds a novel touch to proceedings. Only Angela Bassett, whose brief appearances amount to a series of mannerisms, disappoints.

Rather mysteriously the film was poorly received in it day as across-board-hackery but it is a lot more fun than most mainstream thrillers and any film that has Cassandra Wilson and Mose Allison performing, albeit briefly, must be counted as a cut above.

 

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