User Reviews

Nicholas Cage has explained his penchant for making borderline quality movies by declaring that he wants to be a "working" actor. Specifically he doesn't want to be warming the bench holding out for top quality pictures while time ticks uselessly by. So he makes a lot of movies that, if you weren't aware of the deliberate choice that Cage has made, might leave you wondering why an actor who is presumably still on the "A" list would make such iffy pictures. To Cage, and with apologies to Horton, a movie is a movie no matter how bad. Not only does he like the more regular paychecks, but he's noticed that when focused on working he tends to...um...stay out of...um...trouble.

A SCORE TO SETTLE is about an aging organized crime footsoldier, having spent 19 years in prison voluntarily taking the fall for a crime his boss committed, gets out of prison and determines to reconnect with the now-adult son he hardly knows and to take revenge against the professional associates that he feels did not hold up their end of the deal.

For the most part, A SCORE TO SETTLE falls neatly into the recent line of Cage's work. It certainly has a lot of the typical and predictable attributes we've come to expect of a certified Nicholas Cage Special: a cast mostly composed of medium- to low-grade actors in which Cage is usually the only headliner and it stands out pretty noticeably in terms of the overall acting quality one can expect; an apparently recipe-driven story formula where character and plot points could only be described as "cookie-cutter"; if not excellent then at least good-quality production values but with storylines that really don't stretch sites, situations or action; highly predictable.

About the first 4/5 of the movie will have you clearly thinking it's just another one of Cage's will-act-for-money "working actor" flicks. It may even sink low enough to get you thinking "why am I still watching this".

But as somewhat of a saving grace, the last 5th of the movie suddenly mixes in a small collection of reasonably good plot twists that does go a long way to saving the movie from the garbage bin. Some of these "twists" you have definitely seen before but they do create a context legitimizing the other twists and I would claim take the movie away from the completely formulaic path that you THOUGHT you were following through most of the rest of the picture. In the end, I was glad I watched the movie and it turned out to have a somewhat deeper message than the simple lizard-brain satisfaction of a good revenge flick. Call me stoopid for not seeing it coming, but I was surprised.

But be warned: you really have to hang on until the last portion of the picture in order to get any story rewards. I only held on because I literally had nothing else to do and wanted to see the entire picture in order to write a legitimate review. If I'd stopped in the middle I would've trashed it pretty thoroughly.

As a footnote to this review, Cage's character has the predictable, excessively dramatic I'm-dying-so-I-don't-have-much-time attribute. But, rather interestingly, what he's dying of is sporadic fatal insomnia which is a prion protein disease with multiple potential causes in each case. You don't hear a lot about prion-related diseases in everyday entertainment movies. It represents a rare and odd choice to fill the dramatic-fatal-disease attribute for a character. The typically unspecified cancer is the usual placeholder for that. I am very curious to know why the writer chose such an offbrand disease for the character and then also did not expound or elaborate upon it.

Well let's see...

Out of the 5 or so people that he went back to kill... he only ended up killing 2 of them, one of whom was completely repentant.

Little to no action throughout the movie. The first 20min are rough IMO.

Take any Nic Cage action movie and no matter how B list it may be, or how cheesy some of the support acting is, it makes up for it with its fast pace, cool scenes, and action. This movie is not that. It is boring, head scratching at times, contains one very small "ooooohhh" moment, and ultimately leaves you wishing you had picked blind out of the walmart 1$ bin.

There aren't any explosions or fire in the 2019 Nicolas Cage movie A Score to Settle. But the background of the movie poster is still covered in flames. I think I could probably leave it at that, and you would understand what 'kind' of movie this, but where's the fun in that?

The movie begins with a flashback scene to the 1980s where a bunch of thugs are torturing a tied up thug by trying (and failing) to hit baseballs at him. We know it is the 1980s because they are playing opera music on a boombox. It's an insane scene where a young Cage (played by a different actor) tries to teach his boss how to swing the baseball bat properly then goes outside to look for lost baseballs before returning to find said boss brutally beating and ultimately killing the tied up thug with the bat.

Cage is imprisoned for almost two decades for these above shenanigans. We later learn that he took the fall on purpose in exchange for two things: $450,000 cash and the promise that his thug pals look after his motherless son. Only one of those things actually happens. He's released early from prison because of insomnia, which, sure that checks out.

I'm going to spoil this movie right here and now because it's the only way I know how to do this. This movie is built upon a "twist." What makes the failure of this "twist" that much more condemnable is that it is so clearly aiming for "smart guy filmmaking" territory, and landing not among the borders, not in the periphery, but in a completely different stratosphere. It is a complete failure.

Cage meets his now young adult son Joey in the middle of the road in the middle of the night after being released from the prison because of insomnia. This felt odd! Like, he just shows up in the middle of the road in the middle of the night? They're both walking? The thing with these bad movies is that you are prone to suspend your disbelief when it comes to bad writing and dumbfounded plot mechanics all the time. It was very strange, but at no point was I thinking to myself "Oh, this is a Ghost Son; he's not really there." But, lo and behold, this is a Ghost Son! This is also, as it turns out, a baseball movie.

Cage returns to the hiding spot where the thugs have left the payoff cash and the murder weapon baseball bat for some reason. There's also one of Joey's old baseball cards in the suitcase. If you're wondering who the heck that baseball player on that card is supposed to be, I'm right there with you. There's not much information on a team called the Portland Gladiators let alone a player named Joe Kenneth (this film is set in Oregon, although that isn't important and never specifically comes up outside of this card), but I was able to discern that they were a minor league team who won a championship in their only year of existence... 1896! That is such a weird fake baseball card to make! In this reality, are the Portland Gladiators a real team, perhaps even a pro team? They must be if this card is worth a lot of money, right? Who cares! There is so much more garbage to get to.

We are then subjected to the first of many incredibly bad music choices with an atrocious singer-songwriter song set to some b-roll of the Northwestern landscape and some primo "I'm a free man" faces by Cage as he basks in the sun.

Father and son go to a super fancy resort hotel that we learn Cage's late wife took him to before he went to prison. You know, the kind of romantic place you want to revisit with your adult son whom you haven't seen in 19 years and who isn't actually there. Cage makes the first of many inexplicable "jokes" that do not land at all, but which I find endlessly funny because of that fact.

Then we get the first vague indication that his Son is perhaps a Ghost Son (a figment of Cage's imagination), as Cage is forced to order a ton of expensive food and dine on it alone.

We then get some more father-son bonding with some more baseball-themed memories. We learn Cage made and sold (!) baseball bats in prison. You know, that famous prison activity of making to-order wooden baseball bats for profit, ah yes.

Cage goes to see a gun salesman named Sleepy, but Sleepy is dead. However, Sleepy's kid (female) is there and she sells him a nice and good gun, fresh off the boat from Italy.

We're then introduced to Benjamin Bratt's character (people just call him Q now) and learn that Cage's character is named "Frankie Fingers."

The problem with this being a Fight Club type scenario is that there are far too many scenes where he and his son are together in public. For every "hint" we get that this might be Cage's warped reality, we get scenes like Ghost Son just getting fitted with a new suit at a store? How? And furthermore, the cause and resolution of this phenomena makes little to no sense. Is he hallucinating because of the fatal sporadic insomnia? Is he knowingly projecting because he can't psychologically deal with the loss? Who knows.

After spending a decent chunk of the 450K by Pretty Woman'ing his son, they share a painfully awkward conversation that takes place back at the hotel after their shopping spree. Ghost Son tells his dad that he should chat up the prostitute (Simone) who is getting her shoes on literally ten feet away from them. Remember: HE IS NOT REAL. HE IS NOT THERE. CAGE IS TALKING TO HIMSELF. Then we have back-to-back sex scenes that feel beyond forced.

Before meeting up with the hooker Simone, Cage had a run-in with her pimp. You know, the kind of pimp who hangs around outside super posh resorts way outside of town (the classic pimp spot). He'll return later no doubt.

We get more "jokes" that fails to make any contact whatsoever, and more excruciating dialogue. At this point, we're about halfway through this mess and it's easy to forget that it is, in fact, a revenge movie since there's been very little by way of, you know, getting revenge. So Cage tries to get some revenge on one of the thug underlings called Dragon and is casually very misogynistic in the process of failing to get that said revenge. After Dragon escapes, Cage has this really weird and tonally off encounter with Ghost Son where the latter refers to having sex as "making mercury," which super grossed me out for some reason and I am sorry but I will not be googling to see if that is an actual term people use for having sex.

Part of the reason why the Ghost Son "twist" doesn't work is that we know this kid is a junkie, he looks like a junkie; all his sudden disappearances and funny behavior are easily explained by that.

Anyway, Cage tracks down another thug and this guy just immediately gives himself up and is shot in the head while Cage eats a Slim Jim.

Then Cage sings the Judy Garland era standard "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" as he has a confrontational sing-song chat with Benjamin Bratt at the bar. An increasingly delirious Cage commandeers a bellboy and gets him to teach him how to use a smartphone. Cage gets the bellboy to look up every nursing home in the state so that Cage can hunt down the elderly thug boss and beat him to death with the bloody baseball bat from before.

But the pimp from before shows up to compare sex workers to "feral cats" and to briefly thwart Cage's masterplan, but Cage is armed and ready with some combat moves and some "egg" puns.

Then we get The Big Reveal™ of the "twist." It just happens. There's no real inciting incident, no setup. He just visits his wife's grave, glances over and sees the grave of his son and acts like that was his reality the entire time?!? WHAT!

I was, of course, anticipating a stupid twist. But the rub of this that makes no sense is such: if Cage actually believed his son was alive AND the thugs came through with the $450,000, why was he even interested in getting revenge in the first place? We're also immediately alerted to the fact that Q (Bratt's character) is actually the bad guy and the head thug Max in the nursing home has actually been a vegetable for almost as long as Cage was locked away in jail. No need to beat a helpless coma victim with a 20-year-old bloodstained baseball bat! It was actually Q's fault his son is dead. That's good I guess.

Before he stopped by the nursing home, Cage returned Simone's scarf which flew off her head earlier in the movie, which was very thoughtful of him. Simone's son is named Joey, because OF COURSE HE IS!

He shoots Dragon in the groin before killing him and then goes to the church to confront Q on Q's daughter's wedding day, and Cage has his full-on Cageian freak-out moment that was brewing the entire time, and was worth the wait honestly.

And that's basically it. Total unearned B.S. all the way around, anyway you look at it. There are some awkward flashbacks to the thugs actually executing Joey, and Cage is watching it happen somehow in his memory? Q's daughter--a character we've just met for the first time--is the one who shoots Cage for some reason but the bullet is basically ineffective? No worries, Cage staggers out of the church and there are a bunch of cops waiting outside the church to unload a ton of bullets in slow-motion into our anti-hero's body. Ghost Son returns one more time (this time in Official Ghost Attire) to say what is on everyone's mind watching the film at home, that "this kinda sucks..."

Ghost Son asks his dad what he's gonna do now and Cage says he's gonna ask God to forgive him and then Ghost Son just laughs at that??? You can't make this stuff up.

In many ways, this is a painfully terrible film. So why am I giving it a 7? Because I found it to be truly, legitimately "so bad it's good." Part of the reason I started watching and rewatching the Cage filmography was to uncover a few hidden gems among the late 2010s Cage collection, and I can proudly say that I found one here.

A SCORE TO SETTLE is a truly lamentable effort from Nicolas Cage, who now seems to be going after Andy Lau for the title of world's most prolific actor. The difference is that when Lau was making 6/7 films a year in late '80s Hong Kong, they were all good films, whereas Cage's B-movies are generally rushed and amateurish. This film's a case in point.

Cage plays an old lag, looking tired and bloated after a long prison sentence. He comes out to bond with his druggie kid, and argues with some old gang members and former colleagues. Occasionally he has sex with a prostitute and gets into a fight with a pimp, but that's about all the drama you'll get. The direction is poor indeed, the performances ho-hum, the major twist at the climax shamelessly borrowed from the excellent DEAD MAN'S SHOES. Go watch that instead.