America’s Sweethearts
With Julia Roberts, Crystal, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Cusack, Hank Azaria, Stanley Tucci, and Christopher Walken.
With Robert De Niro, Edward Norton, Angela Bassett, Marlon Brando, and Gary Farmer.
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“Talent means nothing if you don’t make the right choices,” says seasoned safecracker and jazz-club manager Robert De Niro in The Score, as he sets up “one last score” before he quits the game for good. It’s the only sensible thing anyone says in either this movie or America’s Sweethearts, a clunky ribbing of the movie industry, and whoever was making the big choices about these pictures should have taken it as advice. Both appear to be agents’ packages first and movies second, so that even though they’re trying hard to recapture the feel of Hollywood standbys–the heist thriller and the satiric screwball comedy–they seem to proceed from the premise that all that’s required is to throw the right number of “talented” elements in the same direction. It shouldn’t be surprising that the results often look more thrown together than crafted.
That’s a lot of mileage from a few low-budget noirs and one comedy, so it’s not surprising that this subgenre is beginning to show signs of exhaustion. Part of the problem, I suspect, is the fear in Hollywood of anything original or related to the present, though production executives try to cover in part by referring to remakes as if they were tributes. And they shrink the number of characters while expanding the running times: The Score is 40-odd minutes longer than The Killing, yet it’s sparsely populated compared to Kubrick’s broad lineup of memorable character actors. All we get in The Score is the old safecracker and his prickly assistant (Edward Norton), the former’s girlfriend (Angela Bassett) and heist contractor (Marlon Brando), and a stray strong-armer (Gary Farmer, who’s wasted more spectacularly here than Bassett or Brando, playing a nondescript heavy that almost any other large-size actor could do).
