The Score

In a movie that stars Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando, you expect acting. De Niro, playing a Montreal jazz-club owner who has a secret life as an expert heister, provides some, though mostly he just does the kind of shtick he does when he wants to be charming. Director Frank Oz tends to isolate actors in opposing frames; if two people are in the same shot, usually one of them is out of focus. In the scenes between De Niro and Edward Norton (the inside man on the movie's big heist), this approach works well enough: the two don't so much react to each other as score points off each other. But the limitations of Oz's slick cross-cutting show in his incapacity to create a space for Brando (Sydney Greenstreet-esque as the fixer who sets up the job). In Brando's scenes with De Niro, each actor is reduced to doing an impression of himself, making funny faces, giving cliché'd cool a semblance of individuality. The mechanics of preparing and performing the heist threaten to get boring, but they don't, quite. And the film is not so implausible or contrived but not so be unentertaining. The best thing here is Howard Shore's jazz score, with its purring horns and frenetic bass (Charnett Moffett). At the Apple Valley, Entertainment, Holiday, Hoyts Providence 16, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.
-- Chris Fujiwara