The score is excellent -- the musical score, that is, by Howard Shore, bluesy, subdued, taut, anxious, ominous, nearly good enough to convince you that you are watching a legitimate suspense film -- yet the movie on the whole is more con job than big-time caper. The bait, the hook, would be the big-time cast, Robert De Niro, Edward Norton, Marlon Brando, Angela Bassett. Confidence builders, for sure. The second two, on closer inspection, can be summarily dismissed. Bassett is no more than The Girl, an untethered flight attendant who alights intermittently in the apartment of a Montreal jazz-club proprietor and out-of-town safecracker, but who for the duration of the movie stays mostly in flight. Brando, as a foppish fence dressed for the tropics, admittedly commands the well-worn accolade of Can't Take Your Eyes Off Him When He's On Screen, but that's because, primarily, he takes up so much of the screen even in long shot, and secondarily because of our morbid fascination in searching for the slithering sex object of One-Eyed Jacks inside the body of a whale. And in any case, he's not on screen for long. That leaves us, for most of the way, with De Niro and Norton, and a by-the-numbers heist plot whose main virtue is avoidance of excess. Comedy and fantasy director Frank Oz (In and Out, The Indian in the Cupboard, etc.) is concerned more to change his pace than to top his past efforts. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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