C

Back in 1989 Sidney Lumet made a heist flick called “Family Business,” with an impressive multi-generational cast: Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman and Sean Connery. They played, in reverse order, dad, son and grandson in a clan of thieves who get involved in an elaborate robbery, with plenty of complications and lots of intrigue. It wasn’t a good movie, and it pretty much bombed. Now Frank Oz, the old Muppeteer who’s previously directed some pretty nifty comedies (“Little Shop of Horrors,” “Dirty Rotten Soundrels,” “In & Out”), as well as a few duds, segues none too successfully into straight drama with a caper picture showcasing a trio of guys who are, if anything, even starrier than the group Lumet boasted: Edward Norton, Robert De Niro, and Marlon Brando. They don’t play family in “The Score,” but they do form a team thrown together to attempt a difficult, but potentially very lucrative caper: the theft of a valuable seventeenth-century sceptre from a heavily-guarded vault in the basement of the Montreal Customs House. Unhappily, the result is very much a rerun of what happened twelve years ago, because the picture is, for the most part, curiously stodgy and pedestrian. Even a big twist at the finish, which teaches us once again that there isn’t much honor among thieves, can’t compensate for the doldrums that have preceded it.

Given the weakness of the script, in fact, it’s difficult to believe that three stars of such magnitude (in the case of Brando, the phrase applies in more than one sense) agreed to participate. Maybe each of them was tricked into signing up with a false assurance that the other two had already committed to the project. Whatever the case, the screenplay doesn’t offer any of them much of a character. De Niro plays Nick Wells, an aging cat burglar who owns a jazz club and is anxious to retire. His long-time fence Max (Brando) persuades him, however, to undertake one last job (does this perhaps sound a tad familiar?) so they can both live on easy street afterward. The catch is that the operation requires Max to team up with a cocky young con artist, Jack (Norton), who’s cased the target from the inside and can provide the technical know- how to disable the security system while Max does the actual work, sneaking into the vault through the city sewers and blowing open the safe containing the artifact in one of those oh-so- suspenseful breaking-and-entering sequences, complete with ski mask, ropes and pulleys.

Surprisingly, until the twist finale, scripters Kario Salem, Lem Dobbs and Scott Marshall Smith don’t do much to reinvigorate what is actually a tired old plot. The “how it’s done” preparation scenes that fill the first eighty minutes of screen time are mostly flat and uninspired, and the half- hour heist that follows is sluggish and obvious, with the most trite devices utilized to introduce some degree of risk to the proceedings. The final ten minutes finally energize things, but by then it’s too late to make much difference. And despite the big-name stars, the characters aren’t terribly interesting, either. De Niro, in yet another of the sadly ordinary performances he’s given of late (the exception being “Meets the Parents”), repeats the same ruggedly world-weary business he did in “Ronin.” Norton has a showier role, since he’s not only allowed to swagger a lot, but gets to spend a good deal of time pretending to be retarded in his undercover guise as a janitor in the targeted building. The imposture gives the actor a chance to show his versatility, but the whole shtick is actually quite tasteless, and the laughs he gets are pretty cheap ones. As for Brando, in his relatively few scenes he does what amounts to a fairly good impression of Sidney Greenstreet. Given his reputation, that’s hardly a compliment; but the paycheck was probably good, so, hey, what else is there to say? Angela Bassett’s in the picture, too, playing Nick’s sultry singer girlfriend, who–needless to say–wants him to give up the robbery trade; she’s billed third but that’s a joke, since the part’s little more than a cameo–this is a real guy flick. The sole other performer who makes any impression is Jamie Harrold, as a wild-eyed computer hacker who’s Nick’s confidante and helper. This character is now such a walking (or, more properly, sitting-at-the-keyboard) cliche that it’s hard to bring anything new to it, and Harrold certainly doesn’t.

One of the better elements of the film, appropriately, is the score by Howard Shore, David Cronenberg’s regular collaborator. It’s used sparingly, but has a nice throbbing energy to it, and tries at least to interject some energy into a few scenes. Ultimately, though, the picture is let down by a tepid script, plodding direction and–amazingly, in view of the talent involved–indifferent acting; this isn’t a winning “Score.”