CD Reviews
Compiled by Jonathan Z. Kaplan
Mission: Impossible 2 **
Hans Zimmer
Hollywood HR-62277-2.
5 tracks - 45:54
This is the sort of largely electronic, rock-based score that would
have sent a soundtrack geek like me fleeing in terror a few years ago,
but as someone once said to me, if you listen to crap long enough it starts
to sound good. That may be too harsh a description to apply to Hans Zimmer's
music, which has attracted a much wider audience than most sturm-und-drang
orchestral soundtrack composers could ever hope for. And since Steven Spielberg
personally hired Zimmer to be head of music at Dreamworks, the composer
must be doing something right.
Hans Zimmer deliberately took a rock approach to MI2 after the large-scale,
more classically styled Gladiator, and you can't fault his commercial
instincts. The nonstop rhythmic beat of this style works well with director
John Woo's constantly swooping, gliding camera and slo-mo kung fu moves.
Soundtrack purists will hate it, while the man-on-the-street who does not
collect soundtrack albums will probably find it a hell of a lot more listenable
than the latest Jerry Goldsmith album. The MI2 album opens with "Hijack,"
laying down the score's rock grooves with a hint of portentous choir in
a cue that displays all of the scores strengths and weakness: it's catchy
but a trifle pretentious, as befits a movie that takes a measly germ (no
pun intended) of a plot and treats it like the second coming of Christ.
Zimmer gets in an in-joke and a bit of a self-plug in the second cue,
"Zap Mama 'Iko-Iko'" -- yes, it's an even more annoying version
of the song popularized by Rain Man, Zimmer's first score in America
and his first collaboration with Tom Cruise. "Seville" lays down
some flamenco vibes for Cruise's over-romanticized first meeting with Thandie
Newton, after which we get a rather perfunctory, 39-second rock version
of Lalo Schifrin's Mission Impossible theme. "The Heist" utilizes
clapping or tapping percussion and guitar in the manner of some of the
found-music cues from last year's remake of The Thomas Crown Affair,
while "Big Techno" lives up to its name in a cue that will sound
familiar to fans of The Matrix. Zimmer's latest fetish, vocalist
Lisa Gerrard, shows up in "Injection," a good example of the
over-mythologizing of the movie's plot, although it's one of the more attractive
cues melodically.
Like numerous present-day film composers, Zimmer was forced (in "Bare
Island") virtually at gunpoint to adapt Carl Orff's "Carmina
Burana" when "O Fortuna," the most over-used piece of music
in film history, found its way into this film's temp track. The rest of
this lengthy cue is the film's biggest use of the Mission Impossible theme,
but by the time of ensuing cuts like 'Chimera" and "The Bait"
I was getting pretty sick of Zimmer's take on this old classic. "Mission
Accomplished" and "Nyah and Ethan" settles everyone's hash
with a big, guitar-based dash of romance, but it only emphasizes the emptiness
of one of the most hollow movies of the summer. That said, as a rock-based
score this album works fairly well, although it's overlong at 45 minutes.
I much prefer Danny Elfman's work on the first Mission Impossible movie,
but Elfman had a much better movie to work with. -- Jeff Bond
The Big Kahuna **1/2
Christopher Young
Varese Sarabande 302 066 140 2
14 tracks - 33:32
The appearance of the old Mancini / Mercer tune "Charade"
(from the Stanley Donen film of the same name) on the Big Kahuna
album leads one to inevitably wonder if Christopher Young was trying to
capture that same old-style jazz/lounge music with a modern sensibility.
Young's score (24:35 of the album) for film, a three-character drama based
on a stage play, faces the notoriously difficult obstacle of trying to
enliven material that's fundamentally grounded in a small number of settings
and characters. Like much of Young's work, it's well orchestrated, conducted
and played, but it still can't find a way around the film's dramatic potholes.
The album opens with the six-plus-minute title cue, which introduces
Young's approach: lounge-styled, rhythmic percussion with a small ensemble.
Unfortunately, the music doesn't go much further than this. "Philed
With Fuller" and "God's in the Closet" offer a change of
pace, but this material, while pleasant, is so subdued that it drags almost
immediately. "Salterello" is a typical smorgasbord of piano writing
with gentle string backing, but the inclusion of some delicate string clusters
pick up the pace and make the brief cue worthwhile. Other cuts like "Industrial
Lubricants" and "A Little Something of What I Am" go back
to the rhythm section and easy-listening textures, adding little if anything
to the mix.
A little bit of this material goes much further than it should; brevity,
in the case of this score, works in its favor. "The Lateness of Things"
closes out the score's softer portion with admirable restraint, and "El
Kahuna Grande" eases the album out on a low-key note. Young deserves
credit for trying to do something different with his sound, but in getting
away from the heaviness of the horror/sci-fi style that made him popular,
he's also losing his grip. Thomas Newman's American Buffalo is a
good example of how to vary the musical palette when faced with stage-like
material; it would do Young some good to go revisit some of his most popular
material and try to take some of that energy with him into new areas. --
Jason Comerford
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
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