A Score to Settle

This is a good movie with a surprise in it. If you like Cage just see it.

"A Score to Settle" is another disappointing film with Nicolas Cage in the lead role. However, as a fan of this actor, I dare to say that he has a good performance. But the depressing story has a weak plot point and the direction and the screenplay are not in a good pace. Instead of a thriller or an action film, the viewer sees a boring and heavy drama with deceptive conclusion. Nicolas Cage needs to find better stories and screenplays. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): Not Available

For starters, all the 1's are just bone-head amateur reviews. This film - all things considered, is a solid 7/10, and here's why:

It's clearly a low budget B-grade film. You have a novice director (only his 2nd full length feature film, other 4 are shorts and TV films), Shawn Ku, who did a fairly decent job (remember, for a novice filmmaker) with the camera, but needed work on directing his cast (except Cage, who was awesome on his own). Then you have a great (conceptual) story, that was written by a totally green newbie writer, John Stuart Newman, in his 2nd full length feature film. Yes there were some plot issues, and yes the slow pacing was atrocious that the 103 min length felt ridiculously long. But nevertheless, Nicolas Cage kept this film afloat, with some help from Benjamin Bratt (who certainly needed better direction in the beginning).

If this film was properly edited and the pacing sped up 1.5x, it would have been an entirely different (much better) viewing experience. The score was decent and the cinematography on point. It's a shame the producers didn't decide to edit this better, because Cage deserved better for his performance. Nevertheless, rating this film based on its own production merits and value, it's a solid 7/10 from me. I still enjoyed it, but wanted more.

Film tries to be deep and clever with a "plot twist" that anyone with eyes sees coming from a mile away. Cliches of course abound, so expect to see all the generic quotes and tropes you've seen/ heard before. The only twist being that this film blurs the genres of films it steals it's quotes from.

All of this said is it a terrible film? No. It's ok. Just about. Watchable if you're not really paying attention.

Also, whatever you do, don't question the timelines, e.g. how a young adult can go to jail for 19 years but come out an old man.

Anyway, the terrible cliches, inconsistencies in timelines (forcibly injected so the characters fit the proper cliches), and a pretty average script let this film down.

5/10

CF

People tend to jump on the hate train too quickly that they fail to see that this movie had great potential. If only they had a director that knows what he is doing, plus with the budget they had. This is not a bad movie BUT there were some pretty bad moments that pretty much ruined it. This is not an action film but is centered around the Nick's character. So dont expect guns-blazing-mindless-action. Its really not that bad.