The Score (2001)

Frank Oz's The Score belongs to a vanishing species: the patient, procedural heist picture, assembled with the sober craftsmanship of a man building a clock. Robert De Niro plays Nick, a Montreal safecracker coaxed out of retirement for one last job, and the film devotes itself to sewers, schematics, bypass codes and the hydraulics of a pressurized beer keg. It is a movie about logistics. The cultural inventory, when we take it, comes back nearly empty.

Angela Bassett appears as Diane, the girlfriend who frowns at the hero's relapse into crime and then waits at the airport. She won an NAACP Image Award for the role, which tells us more about the scarcity of substantial parts than about the part itself. Gary Farmer turns up in support, unremarked and unthematized. Edward Norton spends much of the running time pretending to be a mentally challenged janitor, a disguise the screenplay treats as a clever costume and nothing more. Race, sexuality, class and the environment are absent from the ledger, not suppressed but simply beside the point. The thieves rob a customs house for six million dollars and a royal sceptre, and the film regards their greed with the neutrality of a hardware manual.

Brando, in his final screen appearance, spent the shoot feuding with his director and calling him Miss Piggy. That anecdote has outlived the film, and reasonably so. The Score is competent, unhurried, and entirely without a sermon in its pocket. In an era that would soon demand that even a jewel heist carry a message, this one carries only a sceptre. We can respect the restraint while noting the emptiness.