10+ / 10
Official trailer
Frank Oz had Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, and Edward Norton, with Angela Bassett in support, and this is the only film that ever put De Niro and Brando on screen together. Somehow he pulled a patient, dialogue-heavy film out of that combination, one that builds to its perfect ending through ninety minutes of pure setup.
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 instead of action mechanics. Read them as a paired set. They earn each other’s company.
What I like about The Score is how little it needs. There are no chases and no shootouts, just three great actors in rooms talking, and I loved it from the first conversation between De Niro and Norton to the last phone call. I’d put it above every heist picture made since, and the ending is the most satisfying payoff the genre has given me.
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 uses the generational gap as material instead of 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 everyone owes him. 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 can’t. 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 acting discipline. Brian can’t 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’s 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, and that’s what the film needs structurally.
When Nick finally realizes that the man he’s 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’s no inflection of Jack inside Brian and no inflection of Brian inside Jack. They’re sealed.
The dual performance also does character work that the dialogue can’t. 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’s ambitious and capable of long-term deception. The same patience that makes the Brian act work makes his later double-cross of Nick believable. Jack plays the long game. He just plays it for himself.
Norton’s Brian is the performance I’d point to for anyone who thinks he coasts. I believed the Customs House staff bought the act because I bought it too, and when Nick finally puts the two men together I felt a little foolish for not seeing it sooner. That’s the feeling the film is after, and Norton earns it.
For Writers
Dual performances work when both halves are doing character work instead of just showing range. Norton’s Brian isn’t a costume Jack puts on. Brian is a sustained piece of evidence about who Jack is: someone who can submerge himself in another identity for months at a time without slipping. That capacity makes Jack dangerous.
When you write a character with two presentations (a public face and a hidden face, a cover and a real self, a performance and a person), make sure both presentations carry information about the same underlying character. The cover should reveal the operative as well as hide them. Otherwise the dual structure is decoration instead of design.
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 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 settled where the Heat character was coiled. I like this Nick better, and the settledness is the reason: it 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 isn’t supposed to be physically active. Max is the kingpin who has retired from physical activity.
His power is positional. 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’s not Brando taking a paycheck.
It’s 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 instead of a series of directions imposed on them. That’s exactly 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 among 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 quiet of a man doing precise work in a building that doesn’t yet know he’s 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’s true to its story, and the story involves characters, not stunts and special effects.” That’s 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.
The water in the safe is my favorite image in the film. I held my breath through that entire stretch and nobody fires a shot, and I’d take this sequence over any number of exploding vaults in louder heist movies.
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 among 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 raises 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’s 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 the writers had written them to act.
This is also the rare heist ending that respects its protagonist. Nick is the experienced operator. The film doesn’t 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’s 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 doesn’t flinch. Nick wins because Nick deserved to win.
That’s the kind of ending that converts a competent heist into a great one, and it’s the kind of ending the film had been promising from the moment Brando proposed the score and Nick accepted.
For Writers
Endings work when character determines outcome instead of plot mechanics. The Score’s ending is structurally perfect because Nick’s traits and Jack’s traits, established across the film as character, are exactly what produce the resolution. Jack’s aggression makes him double-cross. Nick’s caution makes him anticipate. The double-cross and the counter-cross are the logical consequences of who these two men are. When you write your ending, ask whether your characters’ established traits make the outcome inevitable.
If they do, you have an ending that justifies its weight. If the outcome could have happened to different characters who behaved differently, you have a plot resolution instead of a character resolution. The first kind is durable. The second kind is forgettable.
Is The Score worth watching?
The Score is the best contained heist film of the 21st century. The 10+ reflects what the film accomplishes: a character-driven heist that builds to 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 some of his most disciplined work.
De Niro’s Nick is the actor’s most settled work in a heist tone. Brando’s Max is a final-film performance that commits to character instead of coasting. Frank Oz’s direction is patient, trusting, and exactly right for the material.
The film is the case study in heist as character. The Italian Job (2003) is the kinetic celebration of the genre, and The Score is the contained version done perfectly. Both films understand that the heist genre works because of the people executing the heist. They’re companion pieces in spirit even more than in cast.
The 10+ lands where it does because nothing in The Score is wasted. The casting, the patience, Norton’s double act and that final phone call all pay off together, and I can’t name another heist picture from this century that trusts its audience this much.
