The Score (2001)
Directed by Frank Oz
An aging thief hopes to retire and live off his ill-gotten wealth when a young kid convinces him into doing one last heist.
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4 films that influenced The Score
What critics say influenced The Score
Norton's double-play, borrowed from his Oscar-nominated role in Primal Fear, gives him a chance to show his chops among the more seasoned veterans.
Sure, he too has done better work, sometimes with similar characters: he's switched between different personalities in both "Primal Fear" (which got him an Oscar nod) and "Fight Club" (which should have earned him another), and the arrogance of his Jack here somehow reminds of his Worm in "Rounders".
(As in Primal Fear, and sort of in Fight Club , he's playing two personalities within the same body.)
The film gets away with this amusingly tasteless stunt only because Norton, in a variation on his debut in ''Primal Fear,'' does it with such skilled gusto; he makes it seem not a gimmick but a virtuoso ruse.
Norton gets the flashiest parts, reminiscent of his schizoid Primal Fear role (perhaps aided by Oz agreeing to let him write some of his own scenes), since he plays the impatient, smart, young punk looking to make his mark within the inner sanctum of world-class heist artists.
Nick's caution, his watchful radar armor, is a kind of quiet mania, and De Niro, evoking James Caan's brooding nihilistic cat burglar in ''Thief,'' draws you right to the center of what Nick is guarding against: not just getting caught but losing his edge on the world.
But here's a bonus: The three co-star in The Score, a polished, engrossing heist film in the grand style of such classics as Topkapi, Rififi and Thief.
Nick Wells (De Niro) specializes, like James Caan in Thief and Christopher Walken in The Opportunist, in cracking safes of any variety.
John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) started things rolling in the U.S., then came Jules Dassin's Rififi (directed by a blacklisted American) and Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur (both 1955) in France, then Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) back in the U.S., and finally Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), a hilarious Italian parody of Rififi.
The handful that actually manage to find their way out of this thicket are so few and far between that they are just a handful, most of which, like "The Killing" and "Rififi," center on failure rather than success.
Like Curtis Hanson, who wandered into L.A. Confidential as a little-noted gun-for-hire, Oz somehow manages to make his own improbable presence work for the movie; certainly The Score shouldn't be closely compared with Hanson's more tremendous achievement, but in each case our tenuous faith in the project's helmer feeds the suspense of the plot.