Nicholas Cage has explained his penchant for making borderline quality movies by declaring that he wants to be a "working" actor. Specifically he doesn't want to be warming the bench holding out for top quality pictures while time ticks uselessly by. So he makes a lot of movies that, if you weren't aware of the deliberate choice that Cage has made, might leave you wondering why an actor who is presumably still on the "A" list would make such iffy pictures. To Cage, and with apologies to Horton, a movie is a movie no matter how bad. Not only does he like the more regular paychecks, but he's noticed that when focused on working he tends to...um...stay out of...um...trouble.
A SCORE TO SETTLE is about an aging organized crime footsoldier, having spent 19 years in prison voluntarily taking the fall for a crime his boss committed, gets out of prison and determines to reconnect with the now-adult son he hardly knows and to take revenge against the professional associates that he feels did not hold up their end of the deal.
For the most part, A SCORE TO SETTLE falls neatly into the recent line of Cage's work. It certainly has a lot of the typical and predictable attributes we've come to expect of a certified Nicholas Cage Special: a cast mostly composed of medium- to low-grade actors in which Cage is usually the only headliner and it stands out pretty noticeably in terms of the overall acting quality one can expect; an apparently recipe-driven story formula where character and plot points could only be described as "cookie-cutter"; if not excellent then at least good-quality production values but with storylines that really don't stretch sites, situations or action; highly predictable.
About the first 4/5 of the movie will have you clearly thinking it's just another one of Cage's will-act-for-money "working actor" flicks. It may even sink low enough to get you thinking "why am I still watching this".
But as somewhat of a saving grace, the last 5th of the movie suddenly mixes in a small collection of reasonably good plot twists that does go a long way to saving the movie from the garbage bin. Some of these "twists" you have definitely seen before but they do create a context legitimizing the other twists and I would claim take the movie away from the completely formulaic path that you THOUGHT you were following through most of the rest of the picture. In the end, I was glad I watched the movie and it turned out to have a somewhat deeper message than the simple lizard-brain satisfaction of a good revenge flick. Call me stoopid for not seeing it coming, but I was surprised.
But be warned: you really have to hang on until the last portion of the picture in order to get any story rewards. I only held on because I literally had nothing else to do and wanted to see the entire picture in order to write a legitimate review. If I'd stopped in the middle I would've trashed it pretty thoroughly.
As a footnote to this review, Cage's character has the predictable, excessively dramatic I'm-dying-so-I-don't-have-much-time attribute. But, rather interestingly, what he's dying of is sporadic fatal insomnia which is a prion protein disease with multiple potential causes in each case. You don't hear a lot about prion-related diseases in everyday entertainment movies. It represents a rare and odd choice to fill the dramatic-fatal-disease attribute for a character. The typically unspecified cancer is the usual placeholder for that. I am very curious to know why the writer chose such an offbrand disease for the character and then also did not expound or elaborate upon it.
A SCORE TO SETTLE is about an aging organized crime footsoldier, having spent 19 years in prison voluntarily taking the fall for a crime his boss committed, gets out of prison and determines to reconnect with the now-adult son he hardly knows and to take revenge against the professional associates that he feels did not hold up their end of the deal.
For the most part, A SCORE TO SETTLE falls neatly into the recent line of Cage's work. It certainly has a lot of the typical and predictable attributes we've come to expect of a certified Nicholas Cage Special: a cast mostly composed of medium- to low-grade actors in which Cage is usually the only headliner and it stands out pretty noticeably in terms of the overall acting quality one can expect; an apparently recipe-driven story formula where character and plot points could only be described as "cookie-cutter"; if not excellent then at least good-quality production values but with storylines that really don't stretch sites, situations or action; highly predictable.
About the first 4/5 of the movie will have you clearly thinking it's just another one of Cage's will-act-for-money "working actor" flicks. It may even sink low enough to get you thinking "why am I still watching this".
But as somewhat of a saving grace, the last 5th of the movie suddenly mixes in a small collection of reasonably good plot twists that does go a long way to saving the movie from the garbage bin. Some of these "twists" you have definitely seen before but they do create a context legitimizing the other twists and I would claim take the movie away from the completely formulaic path that you THOUGHT you were following through most of the rest of the picture. In the end, I was glad I watched the movie and it turned out to have a somewhat deeper message than the simple lizard-brain satisfaction of a good revenge flick. Call me stoopid for not seeing it coming, but I was surprised.
But be warned: you really have to hang on until the last portion of the picture in order to get any story rewards. I only held on because I literally had nothing else to do and wanted to see the entire picture in order to write a legitimate review. If I'd stopped in the middle I would've trashed it pretty thoroughly.
As a footnote to this review, Cage's character has the predictable, excessively dramatic I'm-dying-so-I-don't-have-much-time attribute. But, rather interestingly, what he's dying of is sporadic fatal insomnia which is a prion protein disease with multiple potential causes in each case. You don't hear a lot about prion-related diseases in everyday entertainment movies. It represents a rare and odd choice to fill the dramatic-fatal-disease attribute for a character. The typically unspecified cancer is the usual placeholder for that. I am very curious to know why the writer chose such an offbrand disease for the character and then also did not expound or elaborate upon it.