A Score to Settle (2019)

A Score to Settle arrives as a 2019 revenge picture starring Nicolas Cage, a man who has spent two decades converting pulp material into something resembling opera. The film concerns Frank Carver, a mob enforcer who took the fall for a killing, served nineteen years instead of six, and emerged with a fatal insomnia that will kill him if he does not sleep. He has a son, or believes he does. The son is dead, a casualty of the same syndicate, and the young man who accompanies Frank through hotel lobbies and suit shops is a ghost assembled from grief and sleeplessness. This is sturdy, old-fashioned material. It is also entirely without social ambition.

Which is not a criticism. The picture moves through its beats with the grim efficiency of a man who has done this before. Blood money changes hands. A prostitute named Simone develops feelings for Frank and is never granted an interior life beyond them. A bar owner named Q, played by Benjamin Bratt, turns out to have ordered the killing. The cast includes Mohamed Karim and Karolina Wydra in supporting turns, and their presence registers as nothing more than competent hiring. No thesis is advanced about any of it. The film has no interest in systems, structures, or the arrangement of power. It has interest in a man with a baseball bat and a limited number of nights left.

Revenge is the oldest story we have, and it requires no instruction manual. This one offers none. There is no sermon, no corrective aimed at the audience, no sense that the filmmakers regard the viewer as a student in need of a lecture. We get Cage, committed beyond reason, and a plot that resolves in a church with a gunshot. The classification is straightforward. A film this incurious about the world beyond its protagonist's grudge earns very little on the scales that measure cultural instruction, and it seems at peace with that.