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As most of you know, Die Hard, Die Hard 2 and Die Hard with a Vengeance were scored by Michael Kamen, while Live Free or Die Hard and A Good Day to Die Hard were scored by Marco Beltrami. Obviously, this was because Michael Kamen died way too early.
I never could get into the Beltrami Die Hard scores. He does use the McClane theme here and there, and a HINT of Beethoven's 9th ONCE in Die Hard 5, but that's it. None of the playful, ironic elements that made Kamen's scores great are in there. He didn't even bother to include the trademark horn blast (heard for example when Hans Gruber falls to his death) in Die Hard 4. He does include it in Die Hard 5, but it's a... "perverted" version of it, it sounds all wrong.
I was also majorly disappointed when he didn't incorporate a classical music piece as the basis of the score. For Live Free and Die Hard, I hoped for the 1812 Overture, for example. That was one of the big things that made the Die Hard films stand out as special action films. The score paralleled McClane's character, who always has this witty, ironic or sarcastic one liner coming when the shit hits the fan, because that's his way of dealing with the situation. That's why there's Christmas tunes, Beethoven's 9th and even I'm singing in the rain coming to the surface every now and then.
Next disappointment was Beltrami's way of scoring action scenes. I cannot listen to them. They sound mostly like a generic, dissonant mess. Kamen's action scoring is beautiful to listen to. That also came to my mind listening to the newly released Lethal Weapon soundtracks.
While I like Beltrami's work in other films, his Die Hard work was a major disappointment for me.
What's your take?
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Posted: |
Dec 12, 2013 - 8:28 AM
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By: |
Ado
(Member)
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First Beltrami has done a lot of good work, his genre pictures for sci-fi adventure stuff usually works pretty well, I Robot and the like. He is a pretty smart guy, and seems like a nice guy too.
Kamen has us pretty pampered and spoiled with the work he did, he made a signature sound for Die Hard 1, and managed to carry it out with some differences in the other pictures very well. I am not sure that anyone could have ever done better than Kamen. I hear the score, I picture Die Hard, I see Die Hard, that is an effective score. Beyond that I think that the Beltrami score is serviceable, but not something that I would want apart from the picture.
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The classical piece Beltrami integrated into Die Hard 5 was..."Smooth Criminal." That alone was amusing enough to carry me through that score.
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Why? Why does it have to be "vs". Why does it EVER have to be "vs".
Okay, truth be told, there's one "vs" - Marco Beltrami is a much better-equipped, technically, composer than Michael Kamen, rest his soul, ever was.
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