Reception
The film received generally positive reviews with a rating of 73% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 128 reviews with a rating average of 6.5/10. The critical consensus was summed up as, "Though the movie treads familiar ground in the heist/caper genre, DeNiro, Norton, and Brando make the movie worth watching."
Peter Travers, a film critic for Rolling Stone, pointed out that when "two Don Corleones team up", he expected "the kind of movie that makes people say, 'I'd pay to see these guys just read from the phone book.'" Instead, what he had to say about it was: "There's nothing you can't see coming in this flick, including the surprise ending. Quick, somebody get a phone book', apparently in reference to Norton's comment in an earlier interview about working with his two idols. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it three and a half stars out of four, calling it "the best pure heist movie in recent years."
Frank Oz on the DVD commentary defends the film as one in which he desired to take risks. Therefore, they started filming with an incomplete script and used several shooting methods that are usually frowned upon in the industry.
After a July 13, 2001 opening, the $68 million dollar film earned a gross domestic box office take of $71,107,711. Combined with the foreign box office, the worldwide total is $113,579,918.
Angela Bassett won a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for her portrayal of Wells' girlfriend, Diane.
Read more about this topic: The Score (film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)