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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you're content with average, stock music for a children's adventure story and several short moments of Trevor Jones magic in the ethnic areas. Avoid it... if those ten to fifteen minutes of stylish and intriguing Jones score for specialty ethnic instruments is offset by the lackluster songs and remainder of tiresome score. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
While his music for the new, Frank Coraci-directed version is nothing less than ambitious and enthusiastic, Jones' contribution to the film seems stuck in the rut of perpetual slapstick action. Rather than producing an adventure of monolithic proportions, which seemed to be the intent with his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen score last year, Jones has swung the doors open to the realm of high-flying children's music. Perhaps more than any other composer in the modern era, Jones has proven to be a chameleon when forming a workable style within a score, and Around the World in 80 Days is a strong example of Jones adapting the sounds heard in previous Disney children's adventures and reproducing them at his customary, bloated levels of orchestration. The title theme for the film is a variation on Harry Gregson-Williams' swashbuckling tune for last year's Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, and the rhythmic, harmonious action cues follow many leads from James Newton Howard's work for animated films by the same studio. The enormous magnitude of the noise produced by the LSO, combined with the often break-neck tempos, may even remind the listener of the wild action cues from James Horner's The Rocketeer. The first half of the score is filled nearly wall to wall with this loud, straight-forward action material, and had Jones continued with only that direct, brass-blaring style, the score could easily have been a headache-inducing nightmare by the end. Luckily for both him and us, the story takes us on a journey around the world through different cultures, allowing Jones to stretch his legs in the areas of world music at which he maintains such a rich knowledge. The action music is by no means substandard, but it does exhaust your ears with its consistent noise and lack of one of those super-dominant themes that Jones is known for conjuring. If you bypass the more generic action cues in the first 20 minutes of the score on album, you'll find some much more impressive action development with a full choir near the end. As the story picks up another main character in Paris (in the fourth score cue), Jones lays on the accordion as the first real break from the action, switching from polka to waltz rhythms that are simple in character, but a relief nonetheless. An elegant, sweeping variation on the rhythm carries into "1st Class Waltz," but Jones finally starts to cook with the female Turkish soprano voice that opens "Prince Hapi Escape." As the story progresses into the Far East, the following two cues offer the score's highlights; slower renditions of themes performed by a Chinese violin and flute, with lush accompaniment from the full ensemble, easily outshine the rest of the album. For brief moments in these two cues, you can almost forget the ridiculous nature of the film and appreciate Jones' more serious melodies. The "Lost in America" cue has the most playful (and enjoyable) action cues that are, understandably, saturated with the musical cliches of the Wild West. A honky tonk piano yields to a swinging clarinet theme in early high jazz style and, inevitably, the snappy percussion and rhythms of the cowboy lifestyle. The final two cues introduce the choral element into the mix, with Jones allowing both the instrumental and vocal ensembles to increase in velocity and intensity as the wager is won. A ripping snare propels us to the finale, and Jones leaves us with the customary, pulse-pounding choral crescendo that you've come to expect from big-budget Disney adventures. On the album, three songs are placed before about 48 minutes of score. The title song is both decent and compatible with the score, incorporating a children's choir into a nice melody. David A. Stewart's voice, though, resembles Jeremy Irons' singing voice a tad too closely, and seems a little too scruffy for such a peasant song. The "River of Dreams" song, starting like a bad rehash of Ace of Base from the mid-1990's, as well as the "It's a Small World" interpretation, range from irritating to outrageously out of place. Hearing the Baha Men crucify a Disney classic (the story didn't even go through the Caribbean, did it?) is an especially disturbing piece of commercialistic garbage from the studio. Overall, there are highly commendable parts of Trevor Jones' score for this remake, but you must survive the relentless happy comedy/action writing in the first half of its length to get to the treasure cues of the latter half. ****
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