No.188 : The Rise (2012)

The Rise at the IMDb

Wikipedia tells me that this film was called ‘Wasteland’ for its North American release, which means that it is the first cross blog feature that we have watched. Both posters are attached but I’ll go with ‘The Rise’ as that was the title card on the version I watched on Film4.

It’s a British film so obviously it deals with drugs, crime, sink estates and respect. It would be nice to see some sci-fi or even a light heated period comedy, but bad slags are cheap so that’s what the British film industry will go with.

The film opens with a beaten up young man talking to Barry off ‘Auf Wiedersein Pet’. Barry has retrained as a police detective and he’s interviewing Harvey, a young man recently released from a year long stretch for dealing drugs. We go the familiar non-linear narrative route, so he tells Barry that it’s a long story and we soon dissolve to a flashback ‘six months before’…

Harvey is a chatty chap and provides a lot of narration about the drugs trade in his estate. He’s supposedly clean, but the local drug lord gets him sent down for a year so that  the police make their quota and the drug lord can be left in peace. After getting out, Harvey decides to get his own back on the drug lord with his crew of three friends, including Ramsay Bolton.

All three are struggling but soon take to Harvey’s plan to rob the drug lord of his takings and to invest the money in a hash café in Amsterdam - it’s good that they have worthy ambitions. He also has to reconnect with his nurse girlfriend, who’s a bit tiresome, and to train the gang so as to flesh out the plot so that enough time passes before we return to Barry in the interview room where all the clever twists are explained.

‘The Rise’ of the title is a working man’s club, and Harvey heard in prison that they have a safe with loads of cash in it. If this seems like a flimsy prospect for a job it also serves as the premise of the film, so keep quiet.

The gang hone their skills in a manner of elaborate an ultimately pointless ways before the heist is on. Will they get the cash and a new worthless life, or will the mild drug lord win the day?

If you liked ‘Oceans 11, 12 and 13’ you may like this, but be warned, it’s ‘Ocean’s 0.5’ at best. The heist is pretty straightforward and although it seemingly goes off the rails, there was never any doubt that a few planned wrong foots would save the day.

The characters were all wafer thin, with it being a mistake to hang the whole film on Harvey who was dull and unengaging. I didn’t care if he got the money or the girl and the whole enterprise was like a bunch of rats fighting over a rotten chicken leg.

Ramsay was a bit underused with this clunker coming out a year before he started in ‘Game of Thrones’. I’m guessing this effort was left off his CV.

There wasn’t much in the way of invention and I didn’t believe in the actions of Barry’s police detective who seemed to make a call on judgement rather than base his decision on the evidence. It looked like he only worked a day on the film, so he probably just wanted to get home.

You may find some form of entertainment hidden within this mess but to be honest I wasn’t engaged at all and the big revelations barely registered on the ‘So what’ meter. These criminals feeding off each other features do nothing for me, and if they were all sucked into a black hole after five minutes I’d have no complaints.

Overall a workmanlike British heist that failed to deliver the goods.

THE Tag Line : Get Your Bad Slags Here!  43%

No.54 : The Score (2001)

The Score at the IMDb

Three acting giants get together for this somewhat routine heist movie. When you have Marlon Brando. Robert De Niro and Edward Norton on the cast list you’d expect something a bit more substantial but I imagine that after all the salaries were paid there was precious little left for the script. The film does have its charms but for the most part that lasting impression is of one ‘is that it?’

De Niro plays an aging safecracker who comes close to being undone in a pretty tense opening sequence. His near miss gives him pause for thought and he’s keen to retire and settle down with sexy air hostess Angela Bassett and manage his swanky jazz club.

His plans are put on the back burner however when his massive and mumbling fence, Marlon Brando, advises that the buyer for his last score has snuffed it and asks that he takes on one last job to put them all on easy Street. De Niro is reluctant at first but is soon talked around and is seduced by the challenge of the job.

The Score is in De Niro’s home town of Montreal and taking it on breaks one of the many rules that he observes and have kept him safe for his whole career. The heist involves the stealing of a $30 million sceptre from the customs house and requires the assistance of an inside man in the shape of Edward Norton. Ed has got a job in the customs house by developing an act of being a bit retarded and has gained access to all of the secure rooms and systems.

There are a few bumps in the planning, such as obtaining computer codes from a corrupt programmer, but essentially the film is a build up to the elaborate robbery and the fall out afterwards. Will the old thief get away clean or will the obvious twist and even more obvious double twist come about?

I always enjoy a good robbery flick and ‘The Score’ doesn’t disappoint. It’s no classic like the nerve jangling ‘Rififi’, but the pace and the planning are well handled making the whole scheme believable. For the most part it’s a two man show between De Niro, the wily old thief, and Norton the young super confident upstart. Brando gets high billing but he only gets a couple of scenes and frankly his part could have been jettisoned with no loss to the film’s narrative or quality. De Niro’s motivations towards him are poorly defined and why he doesn’t tell him to bugger off when he realises he’s getting 20% of the take for doing all the work is inconsistent with the character development that far.

De Niro is great as always and Norton impresses with a double role as the cocky bigmouth and his alter ego spanner character Brian. Angela Bassett could’ve been given more to do but did impress in her limited exposure.

The heist itself is done well with each of the two main characters encountering different impediments to the scheme . In truth the heist itself is secondary to our concerns for the elderly janitor who has befriended ‘Brian’. The scheme itself was ingenious and what seemed impossible was slowly dismantled into a plausible robbery. The fall out however was a bit of a letdown with two consecutive twists signalled from a long way off.

The film is an enjoyable one but given the cast list it’s probably a bit less than you’d be entitled to expect.

THE Tag Line : The Score? 7/10 70%