BEFORE: Travel day, back to New York for the Oscars, but I got this film in the night before by watching it on Hulu - once I'm home and have full access to my movies again, I don't need to stay on Hulu, but somehow that's where most of the Nicolas Cage movies are. (Nic Cage carries over again from "Running With the Devil". Now, what's the best way to organize the rest of the films with him? I think I may try to go in order of ascending ridiculousness, since April 1 is coming up, and I've got a very silly one earmarked for that day. So let's get the POSSIBLE Nic Cage films out of the way first, like the crime-based action films, and then we can get crazy. Umm, crazier. I have to end with last year's film "Pig" in order to make my connection to the next set of films, and then work my way toward Easter.
Tomorrow's Monday, so back to work post-Oscars - I got spoiled by taking Friday off to spend more time with my parents in Massachusetts. But running errands for them is taxing, too - driving to drug stores and picking up things for them at their house that they forgot to pack when they moved. Doing office stuff tomorrow actually seems like a bit of a break, but I digress.
Here's the line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" as they start the final week of March - they're back on films of the 1920's and 1930's, but for the last time:
4:30 am "Eskimo" (1933)
6:45 am "Min and Bill" (1930)
8:00 am "The Divine Lady" (1929)
10:00 am "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933)
12:00 pm "The Great Waltz" (1938)
2:00 pm "San Francisco" (1936)
4:15 pm "Flight Commander" (1930)
6:15 pm "Stagecoach" (1939)
8:00 pm "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1935)
10:30 pm "Cimarron" (1931)
1:00 am "The Big House" (1930)
1:00 am "The Big House" (1930)
2:45 am "One Way Passage" (1932)
4:15 am "A Farewell to Arms" (1932)
I think I can only claim three of these: "The Private Life of Henry VIII", "Stagecoach" and "Mutiny on the Bounty". A few years ago I watched all of the filmed versions of "Mutiny on the Bounty", all in a row, for comparative purposes. Another 3 seen out of 13 brings me to 136 seen out of 308, which is 44.1%. Just three days to go now, so I should be OK.
THE PLOT: An ex-enforcer for a local crime syndicate has vowed to enact retribution on his mob bosses after 19 years of wrongful imprisonment. The only thing diverting his violent plans is a newfound relationship with his beloved son.
AFTER: OK, I started writing this review about the same time the Oscars ceremony started airing, or 8 pm EST. BUT I soon realized that after an hour, it was probably a good time for me to start watching the show, because I could probably skip over the commercials and save an hour, and most likely catch up with the live broadcast before too long. My instincts were solid, I got through an hour of Oscars in about 30 minutes, and then when I caught up, I just moved to the downstairs TV so I could finish the Oscars while heating and eating dinner. Solid plan, but now I'm behind on posting the review of today's film - which, again, was viewed last night/early this morning in Massachusetts. Either way, I'll hold back on my Oscars wrap-up and review until tomorrow.
"Running with the Devil" at least seemed possible, although I'm not an expert on the ins and outs of the drug trade, still it looks like some screenwriter tried to anchor the film in reality, even if he may have fudged some of the details, there was at least a resemblance to the process. But "A Score to Settle" relies on a few things taking place that, well, probably aren't that possible. The main character, Frank Carver, suffers from a specific type of insomnia that will NOT allow him to sleep, no matter how tired he is. If left unchecked, and if he can't find a way to sleep, then this condition will kill him. Is this a real medical condition? Most people probably wouldn't even Google this after watching this film, but I am not most people. Apparently this condition is real, but extremely rare - and it is not classified as a sleep disorder, rather it is a degenerative nerve disease. There are even two kinds, fatal familial insomnia, which is genetic, and sporadic fatal insomnia, the cause of which is still unknown - but again, very very rare, 1 out of every 1.5 million people has the first type and only 25 people total have ever been diagnosed with the second.
Symptoms can include, at various stages of the disease, depression, anxiety, hallucinations, involuntary body movements, blurred or double vision, and cognitive or memory problems. The upside here, though, is that Frank's diagnosis is enough to get him released early from prison, if you can define "after 19 years" somehow as "early", that is. I do recall that during the recent COVID-19 pandemic there were attempts to release non-violent criminals from prison, just because the confined space was likely to be a breeding ground for the coronavirus, and that meant more deaths per capita among the prison population, and allowing people incarcerated for minor offenses to die goes against the whole point of prison - inmates actually need to be alive to get the full benefit and reach some kind of redemptive state, it turns out. A minor crime should not expose an inmate to a deadly disease, because then that becomes a sort of de facto death penalty, right?
So I'm along for the ride so far, Frank is falsely imprisoned for 19 years, he was the fall guy for a murder committed by his mob boss, and something seems to have gone wrong, for his original sentence was only six years, not nineteen. In return for serving time for someone else's crime, Frank received $450,000 and the promise that his son, Joey, would be looked after while he was in prison. But it seems Frank's not happy with the hand he's been dealt, because as soon as he gets out of prison, he goes looking for the old mob crew that did him wrong - either they worked to keep him in prison, or they didn't look after his son, or, you know, maybe he's just bitter that six years behind bars turned into nineteen.
Upon release from prison, Frank first encounters his son, Joey, who he hasn't seen in 19 years. Joey's a recovering addict who sold off his car to pay off his drug debts. Frank makes a stop by his old family house and digs up the money he buried before going to prison, so at least there's that. Frank books a room at a fancy hotel, sets out to spend the mob's money and then get revenge before his disease kills him. I'm still here, still along for the ride, because now we've got a quest and a ticking clock, of sorts, so will Frank find the men who did him wrong and kill them before time runs out?
Frank buys a new suit, a sportscar, and a smartphone, along with a selection of weapons from his old gun dealer's daughter. He checks in with some of his old associates, Jimmy the Dragon, Q and Tank, all to find his old boss, Max, but nobody seems to know where Max is. Or at least that's what they tell Frank, possibly because if they DID know and they DID tell him, well, then they'd no longer be useful to Frank, now, would they? Frank also spends the night with a woman he met in a bar, she turns out to be a prostitute, but he starts developing feelings for her anyway - remember, life is short.
While Frank is off meeting old friends and trying to track down Max, he leaves his son at the hotel, but this makes him vulnerable - apparently Joey gets kidnapped by the mob, but this is right where I'm going to stop giving away the plot, because I want a "no spoiler" zone here. This is a bit of a weird one, though, and it may not end the way you might think it should, that's all I'll say.
Look, I've seen this same sort of movie before - a couple of films in January 2022, even, like "Acts of Violence", where regular people have to keep killing criminals, working their way up a chain of command until they get to kill the proper people responsible for the crime in question. But the thing about the Bruce Willis chain was that Mr. Willis didn't usually play the lead character, he played mob bosses or corrupt sheriffs or fathers who were secretly spies, but those action films were all designed to just have Bruce Willis on the set for one day, two days max, so of course they had to shoot out of order and make sure they could all be shot in one day, one location, with minimal costume changes. But so far the difference in the Nicolas Cage chain is that Mr. Cage DOES tend to still play the lead character, so for this one and next six (or is it seven?) he's going to be front and center, and possibly in every scene. Good for him, I don't think he's ready to retire or reduce his workload, because he seems to be working a LOT - only because he's been getting so much screen time that his shooting schedules are longer, and he was only able to appear in THREE new features released in 2021, two the previous year in 2020, and today's film (along with yesterday's) was released in 2019, part of SIX Nic Cage films that got released that year.
The whole thing with the baseball bat was pretty unclear, though - was it the same one used to commit a crime, or did Frank take up woodworking while in prison? The latter makes more sense, however the plot summary on Wikipedia seems to favor the former. Well, it just can't be both.
Will Frank be successful in getting his revenge before his condition kills him? He is pretty determined, plus think how much more you could accomplish if you didn't have to sleep for eight hours every day! So when viewed that way, I'm kind of liking his chances. Then again, fatal condition...
Also starring Noah LeGros, Karolina Wydra (last seen in "Crazy, Stupid, Love."), Mohamed Karim, Ian Tracey (last seen in "Owning Mahoney"), Benjamin Bratt (last heard in "Coco"), Bailey Coppola, Dave Kenneth MacKinnon, Alex Alegria, Linda Ko, Nicole G. Leier, Sean Owen Roberts (last seen in "The Predator"), Leanne Khoi Young, Carmel Amit, Nicole Muñoz.
RATING: 4 out of 10 girls at the massage parlor
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