The very thought of seeing three generations of great actors in the same film, not to mention watching them play professional thieves, is enough to make moviegoers salivate with anticipation.  But The Score, which stars Marlon Brando (77), Robert DeNiro (57) and Edward Norton (32), offers little more than a strange combination of heist-flick clichés and cop-flick clichés. The tales of on-set feuds between director Frank Oz and Brando were more exciting than anything that ended up in the final cut.  In other words, this ain't no Rififi.

De Niro (15 Minutes) plays Nick Wells, an expert safecracker who owns a tiny jazz club in Montreal.  He's a careful criminal, opting only for The Sure Thing and never, ever dreaming of pulling off a job in his own backyard.  Nick is in a serious relationship with a flight attendant named Diane (Angela Bassett, Supernova) and tells her he's about to hang up his tools of the trade to be her full-time man.  But then his fence, Max Baron (Brando), tells him about a job that could net him $2 million.   Nick's penchant for low-risk crimes hasn't left him financially sound, and he sees this opportunity as The Last Big Score before he rides off into the sunset with Diane.

The trouble is that Max's job involves knocking over the Customs House in Montreal to liberate an extremely valuable French scepter.  Nick is immediately uninterested and becomes ever more put off when Jackie Teller (Norton, Keeping the Faith), Max's man on the inside of the Customs House, approaches him on the street in an attempt to lure him into the heist.  But the power of the Almighty Dollar is too much for Nick to ignore, and he signs on after receiving Jackie's assurances that Nick call the shots.

What follows is the same-old/same-old when it comes to films about professional thieves.  They stake the place out.  They think of ways to break into the safe.  But no matter how detailed their plan is, you know something is always going to go wrong in this kind of cinematic situation. The few things that broke the heist-film mold were easily the best parts of The Score, like Nick's nerdy computer friend who tries to steal security passwords with his hacking skills.

I couldn't help but find The Score to be a twisted cross between Lethal Weapon and every high-stakes theft film made in the last 25 years.  DeNiro is the gruff Danny Glover, who is only a few days away from retirement and doesn't want to blow his police pension, while Norton is the younger, flashier Mel Gibson, shamelessly stealing scenes (he even plays a dual role again, a la Aaron Stampler and Tyler Durden).  This is only his eighth film, and he more than holds his own with Brando and DeNiro. 

The film's screenwriters, Lem Dobbs (The Limey), Scott Marshall Smith (Men of Honor) and Kario Salem (the story was concocted by Salem and Daniel E. Taylor, TV's The Beast), try to make DeNiro's Nick unnecessarily complicated, but he comes off as an aging sad-sack thief; the Willy Loman of burglary.  Parts of the story work, but it's mostly a lot of unexciting stuff they try to turn into full-on suspense.  I only approached the edge of my seat once or twice.

You can't really blame the acting, aside from Bassett's wasted performance and, possibly, the lack of scenes with Brando.  We're talking about four people with 17 Oscar nominations (and four wins) between them. Interestingly, Brando and DeNiro have played the same character (Vito Corleone in The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II) but have never appeared on screen together before.

2:05 -

for language