Nicolas Cage’s Unhinged Revenge Thriller Makes No Sense, But You’ll Watch It Anyway

By Robert Scucci
| Published 11 seconds ago

Here’s something I’ve learned about myself that I’m not particularly proud of. When I’m scrolling through my streaming apps looking for something to watch, I occasionally stumble upon a Nicolas Cage flick I’ve never seen before, like 2019’s A Score to Settle. The truth is I probably thought I’d already seen it, but was confusing it with one of his other straight-to-video outings with a similar revenge-coded title, like Stolen, Rage, Dog Eat Dog, and so on. While I’m thrilled that I’m one film closer to seeing everything Nicolas Cage has ever done, I’ve gotta say this movie is pretty terrible.

But here’s the thing every Nicolas Cage fan will tell you: a terrible Nicolas Cage movie is still a good Nicolas Cage movie, because Nicolas Cage is in it. I’m sorry, but it’s true. The screenplay is absolute trash, but he still commits to it. It makes no sense no matter how you break it down. He’s still the greatest actor on this planet, and I’m glad I’m alive at the same time he is because it means that when I stare up at the moon at night, he might be looking at it too.

Why A Score To Settle Makes No Sense

Here’s where I’d normally break down the plot before offering commentary, but I don’t think that’s entirely possible with A Score to Settle. I’ll try, but I can’t promise anything coherent. Nicolas Cage plays a man named Frank who’s released after serving 19 years in prison because he has a rare form of insomnia that will eventually kill him, so they just send him home.

Why is Frank serving 19 years? When he was younger, he worked for the mob and witnessed his boss Max (Dave MacKinnon) murder one of his hustlers with a baseball bat. He’s promised he’ll be paid handsomely and that his family will be taken care of, so he takes the fall under the assumption he’ll be out in six years. Instead, he gets a life sentence. His wife dies while he’s inside, and his son Joey (Noah LeGros) grows up to become an orphan and a drug addict.

In other words, Nicolas Cage’s character is perfectly set up for revenge because he willingly went to prison for someone known to double-cross people, and then acts shocked when that exact thing happens, as if he was born yesterday. After his release, he reconnects with Joey and digs up a briefcase buried in his old backyard that contains $450,000 and the murder weapon. And I need to remind you again that the people who locked him up thought he bludgeoned somebody to death with a baseball bat, and they just let him go, even though it’s confirmed without a sliver of a doubt that he’s mentally unstable.

He then takes his drug-addicted son to a luxury resort, buys him lobster and lamb, expensive watches, and a Corvette, as if that’s going to make up for an entire childhood without a father who willingly put himself behind bars for an amount of money that in this economy will buy a modest house, at best. Considering how much money he’s spending right off the rip on an excessive amount of luxury items, he’ll probably have to settle for a duplex with bars on the windows when all is said and done.

It Gets Worse

Nicolas Cage starts tracking down the men who wronged him in A Score to Settle, passing out at the most inopportune times because of his life-threatening insomnia. He falls in love with a prostitute named Simone (Karolina Wydra), then gets mad at a pimp for sending a different woman using the same name the next day. He buys automatic weapons from the daughter of a former associate known as Sleepy, in front of her kid, then kills a man named Tank while snacking on beef jerky at his upscale, butcher-themed gastropub.

Nicolas Cage doesn’t know how to use a cell phone because he missed the smartphone boom while in prison, but somehow immediately knows how to use the device’s GPS while driving a sports car at reckless speeds. Earlier in the film, he paid a bellhop $500 to help him get it off its lock screen and look up a couple of addresses for him. Stuff like this keeps happening in A Score to Settle, and I’m not even going to spoil the most ridiculous part because you need to see it for yourself.

Every revenge trope you can think of shows up in A Score to Settle, but you also have to remember that because of the insomnia angle, it’s technically a psychological thriller too, but only when it feels like being one. It’s a ramshackle affair where Nicolas Cage does the best he can with what he’s given, but what he’s given is so bad that even he can’t save it. I’ll give him an A for effort, but A Score to Settle makes Prisoners of the Ghostland look like Casablanca by comparison.

If you’re working your way through Nicolas Cage’s filmography as a means to cope with the horrors of modern life, A Score to Settle won’t do you any favors. It will get you one step closer to your final form, and it does deliver some classic Cage Rage, which is always good for the soul. This one’s an absolute punisher, though, and you should know that going in.

A Score to Settle is currently streaming for free on Tubi.