The Score is the first & only time Robert De Niro & Marlon Brando shared the screen together even though they each own Oscars for playing the same character. Brando showed up in this film just a few years before his passing. But Edward Norton quietly steals the show from both Brandon & De Niro in an earlier performance from Norton. This is a damn-good early โ00s heist thriller.
Everyone calls Fredo the weak one. Watch that scene again.
His father gets shot in the street and Fredo freezes. He fumbles his gun, drops it, ends up on the curb crying like a kid. For most people that settles it: he's useless, he's not built for this life.
But that's the point. Fredo was never meant to be strong, or smart. He wasn't Sonny. He wasn't Michael. He was an ordinary man who happened to have the Godfather for a father. So when the shooting starts, he does what most of us would do. He panics. He breaks.
The same softness that made him a bad gangster was the one thing the family had no room for. Michael runs the business better than any of them ever could. But the day he loses Fredo, he loses the last soft thing left in him.
A family can't run on business alone. Fredo was the proof. Nobody saw it until he was gone