The Score (2001) — Review

The Score is the best contained heist film of the 21st century and one of the finest examples of restraint-as-suspense in modern American cinema. Frank Oz directed Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, and Edward Norton in the only on-screen pairing of De Niro and Brando, with Angela Bassett in support, and somehow extracted from that combination a film that is patient, dialogue-heavy, character-driven, and earns its perfect ending through ninety minutes of pure setup. I loved every minute of it from the first viewing forward, and the ending is, as Richard’s framework allows, perfect.

The film pairs naturally with the 2003 Italian Job as the Norton heist double feature. Both films cast Norton as a thief whose performance is itself the heist (the “Brian” character here, the false teammate Steve there), both films pivot on betrayal between criminal partners, and both films understand that what makes heist cinema work is character mechanics rather than action mechanics. Read them as a paired set. They earn each other’s company.

Three Generations Of American Acting

The pitch for The Score is famously the casting. Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and Edward Norton, three generations of American screen acting in one film, with De Niro and Brando sharing the screen for the only time despite both having won Academy Awards for playing Vito Corleone in the Godfather films. That casting alone would be enough to make the film a curiosity. What makes it durable is that the film actually uses the generational gap as material rather than treating the gap as decoration.

Brando is the older generation, the operator who has been fencing stolen goods so long he no longer leaves his house, who manipulates from a chair like Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, who knows everyone and owes everyone and is owed by everyone. De Niro is the middle generation, the working pro who has cracked safes for thirty years and is finally tired of it. Norton is the new generation, the ambitious specialist who believes that intelligence and aggression can substitute for experience and will eventually learn that they cannot. The film is structurally a meditation on what each generation gets right and what each one gets wrong, and the ending settles the argument in favor of patience over ambition.

This is the rare film where casting choices are themselves the screenplay’s argument. Three different generations of American screen acting embody three different generations of American criminal practice. None of the casting decisions are decorative. All of them are doing thematic work.

Norton’s Dual Performance

Edward Norton plays Jack Teller, an ambitious young thief who has spent months working as a janitor inside the Montreal Customs House by pretending to be a mentally disabled man named Brian. The “Brian” performance is the film’s showpiece. Norton has to switch between Jack and Brian convincingly, sometimes in the same scene, and the audience has to believe that the people inside the Customs House would never see through the act. That requires a specific kind of acting discipline. Brian cannot be a sketch or a stunt. He has to read as a complete person whose specific way of moving, speaking, and engaging with the world makes him invisible as a threat.

Norton commits completely to both characters. Jack is impatient, controlling, prone to threat displays, and convinced he is smarter than everyone he meets. Brian is patient, helpful, slightly off in his social cues, and apparently incapable of the cognitive work the heist will require. The performances are constructed so that the same physical actor reads as two different people, which is what the film needs structurally. When Nick finally realizes that the man he has been working with is the same man as Brian, the realization has to land for the audience too. Norton sells it by having played each character independently from the start. There is no inflection of Jack inside Brian and no inflection of Brian inside Jack. They are sealed.

The dual performance also does character work that the dialogue cannot. Jack’s willingness to spend months as Brian (humiliating himself daily, accepting condescension from janitors and security guards, suppressing his actual personality) tells you that he is not just ambitious but specifically capable of long-term deception. The same patience that makes the Brian act work is what makes his later double-cross of Nick believable. Jack plays the long game. He just plays it for himself, not for the team.

De Niro And Brando

Robert De Niro plays Nick Wells as exactly what the character requires: a man so practiced at this work that the practice is now his entire personality. Nick speaks quietly. He moves carefully. He thinks before he acts. He has the specific calm of someone who has been doing dangerous work for decades and has internalized the discipline that survival in the trade demands. De Niro has played versions of this character before (Heat is the obvious reference), but the version here is more interior and less performative than the Heat version. Nick is not coiled. Nick is settled. The settledness is what makes the ending work, because the audience believes that this man would have anticipated every move Jack might make.

Marlon Brando plays Max in his final film role. The consensus reading was that Brando was phoning it in, that the legendary on-set conflicts with Oz (Brando calling Oz “Miss Piggy,” refusing to be directed, performing scenes in his underwear) bled into the work and produced a coasting performance. That reading is wrong in the same way the “Norton phoning it in” reading of the Italian Job is wrong. Max is not supposed to be physically active. Max is the kingpin who has retired from physical activity. His power is positional, not muscular. He sits in his chair, talks on his phone, makes the introductions, takes his cut, and never gets up. Brando plays him as exactly that: a man whose entire authority is concentrated in his patience and his network and his refusal to participate in the dirty work he profits from. The slight smile, the lordly delivery, the suggestion that he finds the whole genre slightly amusing, all of it is character. It is not Brando taking a paycheck. It is Brando playing a man who has been taking other men’s paychecks for forty years and no longer needs to perform competence for anyone.

The on-set conflicts are real. They also did not damage the film. The performance is what the character requires. Critics who confused production gossip with screen evidence misread the work.

Frank Oz Was The Right Director

Frank Oz directed The Score after a career mostly defined by Muppets puppeteering and comedies (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, What About Bob?, Bowfinger). The choice of Oz for a serious heist drama looked strange on paper and looks brilliant on screen. The film is patient where most heist directors would push. The dialogue scenes between De Niro and Norton are allowed to play at the length they require. The heist itself is shot with the kind of careful spatial attention that comedies require to make physical gags land, applied here to make suspense land instead. Oz’s instinct for letting performers be performers, refined across decades of working with puppeteers and comic actors, translates into a heist film where the actors carry every scene.

The casting of three weight-class performers also benefited from a director who was not interested in dominating them. Oz let De Niro, Brando, and Norton do their work. The result is a film that feels like a series of negotiations between actors rather than a series of directions imposed on them. That is precisely what a character-driven heist film requires.

The Heist Sequence: Restraint As Style

The actual heist occupies roughly the final twenty-five minutes of the film and is one of the most disciplined heist sequences in modern cinema. There are no car chases. There are no shootouts. There are no explosions in the action-movie sense. Nick enters the building through the sewer system, locates the safe, fills it with water, and detonates a depth charge to blow off the door. The depth charge is the only piece of spectacle in the entire sequence. Everything else is patience, infrared sensors, motion detectors, and the specific quiet of a man doing precise work in a building that does not yet know he is there.

The sequence works because Oz trusts the audience to find suspense in the basic question of whether Nick will succeed. Roger Ebert wrote that the film “honorably avoids a copout ending of gunfights and chases. It is true to its story, and the story involves characters, not stunts and special effects.” That is exactly correct. The heist is suspenseful because the audience has spent ninety minutes learning who Nick is and what he can do, and now gets to watch him do it under conditions that could go wrong at any moment. No gunfire is necessary. The water is enough.

Howard Shore’s score (the year before he won Oscars for The Lord of the Rings) carries the sequence with restraint that matches the staging. The cue during the underwater safe-cracking is one of the most under-discussed pieces of heist scoring in modern cinema. Shore understood what the sequence required and delivered it: tension without theatrical weight, presence without intrusion.

The Ending Was Perfect

The ending is what elevates The Score from very good to great. Jack double-crosses Nick at gunpoint after the safe is opened, takes the carrying case containing the scepter, rigs the alarm to give himself cover for the escape, and slips out in his Brian disguise while Nick has to flee through the sewers. Jack thinks he has won. He calls Nick from the bus station to gloat. He opens the case. The scepter is a steel rod.

Nick had anticipated everything. He switched the cases at the moment of the handoff. He left Jack with the decoy and took the real scepter for himself. He warns Jack to flee before the police arrive, hangs up, and boards a boat back to Diane with the actual loot. Jack is wanted, hunted, and empty-handed. Nick is retired, wealthy, and reunited with his fiancée. The mentor outsmarted the student. Character determined outcome.

The ending is perfect for several reasons at once. Every element of it was set up across the film. Nick told Jack early that he always works alone. Jack told Nick early that he never trusts anyone. Max warned Nick that Jack would betray him. Nick’s caution and Jack’s aggression were established as character traits in the first thirty minutes and pay off in the last five. The double-cross is what Jack’s character would do. The counter-cross is what Nick’s character would do. Neither character is surprised by the other’s behavior. Both characters acted exactly as they had been written to act.

This is also the rare heist ending that respects its protagonist. Nick is the experienced operator. The film does not punish him for his experience. It rewards him for it. He gets the gold and the girl and the retirement he wanted, all of it earned by the same careful patience that has defined him from the first frame. Most modern heist films flinch at the third-act consequence and find some way to deny their protagonists their victory. The Score does not flinch. Nick wins because Nick deserved to win. That is the kind of ending that converts a competent heist into a great one, and it is the kind of ending the film had been promising from the moment Brando proposed the score and Nick accepted.

The Verdict

The Score is the best contained heist film of the 21st century. The 10+ reflects what the film actually accomplishes: a character-driven heist that earns its perfect ending through ninety minutes of pure setup, executed by three generations of American screen acting at the top of their respective forms, directed with a restraint that matches the material, and resolved in the way the audience has been promised from the first frame. Norton’s dual performance as Jack and Brian is one of his most disciplined showcases. De Niro’s Nick is the actor’s most settled work in a heist register. Brando’s Max is a final-film performance that earns its place as character rather than coasting. Frank Oz’s direction is patient, trusting, and exactly right for the material.

The film stands as the case study in heist-as-character. The Italian Job (2003) is the kinetic celebration of the genre. The Score is the contained masterclass. Both films understand that what makes the heist genre work is not the heist but the people executing it. They are companion pieces in spirit even more than in cast.

The ending was perfect. The film was perfect. The casting was perfect. The 10+ is what it earned and what it continues to earn on every rewatch. Watch it. Watch it again. The film rewards every viewing.

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FAQ

Is The Score actually better than Ocean’s Eleven (2001)?

Different films. Ocean’s Eleven (released the same year) is a stylized ensemble caper with a large cast, comedic register, and Soderbergh’s specific visual signature. The Score is a contained character piece with three principals, dramatic register, and Frank Oz’s restraint. Ocean’s Eleven is the more famous film. The Score is the more disciplined one. Both are excellent at what they are doing. The Score has the better ending.

Was Marlon Brando really phoning it in?

The on-set conflicts with Frank Oz are real and well documented. The argument that this damaged the performance is the consensus reading and it is wrong. Max is supposed to be lordly, patient, and disengaged from physical activity. He runs his network from a chair. Brando plays him as exactly that. What looks like coasting is character. Brando’s last filmed performance is closer to discipline than to laziness, and the production gossip has been confused with screen evidence by most reviewers who never separated the two.

How does it compare with The Italian Job (2003)?

The two films pair naturally as the Norton heist double feature. Both cast Norton as a thief whose performance is itself part of the work (the Brian disguise in The Score, the false teammate in The Italian Job). Both turn on betrayal between criminal partners. Both understand that heist cinema lives or dies on character mechanics rather than action mechanics. The Italian Job is the louder, more kinetic film. The Score is the quieter, more restrained one. Read them as a paired set. They earn each other’s company. See the Italian Job (2003) review for the companion piece.

What did Roger Ebert think?

Ebert gave the film a strongly positive review and identified its central virtue correctly: the film “honorably avoids a copout ending of gunfights and chases. It is true to its story, and the story involves characters, not stunts and special effects.” He was right about the restraint, right about the cast, and right that the heist sequence earns its suspense through character investment rather than spectacle. His review remains one of the best contemporary accounts of why the film works.

How was the heist sequence filmed?

The Customs House interiors were built on a Montreal soundstage. The underwater safe-cracking used a combination of practical effects (real water flooding a practical safe set) and minimal digital work. The depth charge detonation was a practical effect filmed in a controlled environment. The sewer escape was filmed in actual Montreal infrastructure. Frank Oz’s preference for practical staging matches the discipline of the film itself: the sequence works because the audience can feel the physical reality of what Nick is doing rather than watching CGI substitutes for real risk.

Why does the ending land so cleanly?

Because the ending is the logical consequence of the characters as written. Jack’s aggression and overconfidence are what make him double-cross Nick. Nick’s caution and experience are what make him anticipate the double-cross and prepare for it. Both characters behave exactly as they have been written to behave. The double-cross and the counter-cross are not plot twists. They are character traits operating on each other at the climax. That is the structural difference between a heist film with a satisfying ending and a heist film with a contrived one. The Score earns its ending. Most modern heist films don’t.