Nick Wells (De Niro) specializes, like James Caan in Thief and Christopher Walken in The Opportunist, in cracking safes of any variety. In a tense opening sequence at a chichi estate in upstate New York, we witness Nick plying his trade and making off with a diamond necklace while a lawn party rages outside. Returning to his home and club in Montreal, Nick contacts his fence, the enigmatic Max Baron (Marlon Brando), and discovers that there might be one last score that will net the pair enough cash to retire. The catch, and it's a big one, is that Nick will need to rely on a young turk named Jackie Teller (Edward Norton) who, under the guise of a mildly retarded, cerebral palsy-afflicted youth, has infiltrated the heavily guarded Montreal State House. Though Nick's instincts argue against it, he desires a normal life with girlfriend Diane (Angela Bassett) and agrees to undertake the heist with the mysterious Jackie.

Robert De Niro reunited with his Godfather quasi-co-star Al Pacino in Michael Mann's Heat, a grave and operatic crime opus in which De Niro played an aging thief looking for one last score. He reunites here with his Godfather quasi-co-star Brando in a grave and operatic crime opus in which De Niro plays an aging thief looking for one last score. The difference, and it's a vital one, is that Brando and De Niro are on the same side. A lack of real tension between its marquee idol leads injures The Score, a film that reminds a great deal of Robert Towne's Tequila Sunrise in terms of being big-name, glossy, jazzy, classy, bland. It also reminds of Twilight and Family Business in its dedication to providing screentime to a cast of luminaries at the expense, sometimes, of cohesion and pace.

The Score's failures all lie in impetus and motivation. Nick's motivation to retire after a final gig is so tired that it may as well not be a motivation (and Diane, so insipid and smirky that it's hard to see the attraction); Max's motivation is revealed too late to create any sort of dramatic tension; and Jackie is clearly just a walking plot device. Each character is so underdeveloped or genre clichéd that an unbridgeable gap is created between the struggles of the protagonists and their audience. So simplistic are the characterizations that all you need to know about each of them is encapsulated by their last names: Nick Wells does things well, Max Baron is a minor lord of a criminal underground, Jackie Teller is perhaps duplicitous, and Diane, who has no last name, is an irritating cipher.

Not knowing anything of worth or substance about any of the individuals necessitates that external forces impel the movement of The Score's plot. To that end, director Frank Oz supplies exhaustive planning details and manufactured complications which will so clearly be resolved by the third act that they don't strike us so much as plot points as they do excuses to drag out the middle section to no good end. Credit is due Oz, however, for the courage to take his time and to refrain from nearly any violence. The film is rated R for a few blue words, but the rating here, especially in light of the atrocities of war sugar-coated in the PG-13 Pearl Harbor, makes as much sense as it did for Stand By Me.

The Score is a nice-looking film that is so stylized it threatens, especially during an inexplicable swimming pool scene, to collapse under the weight of its own noir aspirations. While the ultimate heist sequence does have some gritty realism and pure tension, the resolution of the film is never really in doubt and the travails and victories of the protagonists are neither a surprise nor something that we're terribly invested in one way or the other. Diane is a worthless and distracting character, Norton is gimmicky (but always enjoyable), Brando is fun but nothing special in a role that feels like an afterthought, and De Niro plays exactly the same role that he did in Heat. The Score, in other words, is a workmanlike film that is technically fine and emotionally vacant. It's not a travesty, but the more one considers the quality of the cast employed in what is essentially a glossy, rote heist flick, the closer it comes to being one.-Walter Chaw