The Score

When we think about heist films, we con­jur up images of fast car chas­es and men who think they are super hard. Scrap all that – appar­ent­ly there’s a new way to do it. The Score, from writer and direc­tor Malachi Smyth, is a pan­dem­ic-made thriller that attempts to express its own mean­ing by dis­pos­ing of the notion of
palm-sweat­ing ten­sion and opts instead for some Mam­ma Mia-esque out­bursts of folk rock to ease its pro­tag­o­nists into its storyline. 

The film stars Brit char­ac­ter stal­warts Will Poul­ter and John­ny Fly­nn as a pair of un-smooth crim­i­nals play­ing the wait­ing game at a road­side café. Their time is spent mix­ing hard-boiled bants with a num­ber of musi­cal inter­ludes cour­tesy of Fly­nn him­self, which lends the film a more the­atri­cal than cin­e­mat­ic quality.

Pro­ceed­ings open with a musi­cal num­ber per­formed by all of the main cast, which sets both the tone and the scene. Troy (Poul­ter) dis­cov­ers a big bag of cash that was stashed away by his old­er broth­er who we lat­er find out is incar­cer­at­ed. Mike (Fly­nn) hands over a gun to his wife at the car­a­van park where they live. Mean­while Glo­ria (Nao­mi Ack­ie) is just near­ing the end of a shift at the café. 

Giv­en Fly­nn a chance to flex his musi­cal mus­cles does feel like an inter­est­ing way to give this hard-worn mate­r­i­al a fresh sheen – he’s a con­fi­dent singer and per­former. Yet Poul­ter and Ack­ie seem less com­fort­able in this con­text, and the eccen­tric songs end up dis­solv­ing any raw­ness the pair might have brought to their characters.

Much of the film occurs with­in a sin­gle loca­tion, and we see Mike and Troy wait­ing to pull off their deal. Dur­ing this process, we also see a blos­som­ing romance occur­ring between Troy and Glo­ria. Yet their roman­tic repar­tee comes across like flir­ty DMs on a dat­ing app. 

Glo­ria at one point says to Troy, ​“Tough guy?” to which Troy replies with, ​“me thinks”. The play­ful, cat­ty dia­logue serves to dis­con­nect the plot and char­ac­ters from any kind of believ­able tone, not to men­tion a sense that we should real­ly care for these people.

This stripped back tale does gen­er­ate a bit of ten­sion in leav­ing var­i­ous key details blank: how much mon­ey is in the bag?; Who is it for?; What is their per­son­al rela­tion­ship? Yet in the end, most of these intrigu­ing ques­tions are ignored, and if they are dealt with, the answers are hard­ly mind-blowing. 

There’s a sense that Smyth’s writ­ing only works in fits and starts, and all the frac­tured ele­ments don’t ever quite fit togeth­er. Flynn’s musi­cal con­tri­bu­tions, too, are all lack­ing in lyric depart­ment, and where they might have made for a decent stand-alone solo LP, it’s hard to know what wider func­tion they play in the film.