Buy it... if you just can't get enough tragedy out of Batman and wouldn't mind a re-hash of its motifs and action music in a lesser-quality rendition.

Avoid it... if you never bought into the Batman score in the first place.

Elfman

Darkman: (Danny Elfman) Long before composer Danny Elfman would team with director Sam Raimi for the highly successful first two Spider-Man films, there came the very early Raimi film Darkman, the start of the director/producer's fascination with comic book heroes. After the massive success of Batman in 1989 --for both the fate of comic book characters on the big screen and for Elfman in that genre-- a significant number of other adaptations began to flow into theatres throughout the 1990's. Interestingly, Darkman was one of the few not to be based on a historical character. Instead of adapting an existing character, Raimi and a host of writers concocted the story of Dr. Peyton Westlake, a talented scientist experimenting with synthetic skin who is left for dead (and badly mangled) after hitmen destroy his lab. In the process, Westlake's nerves are altered by doctors and he achieves both superhuman strength and uncontrollable rage. Obsessed with the destruction of his enemies, as well as the lost love of his girlfriend, the Darkman goes about his revenge while using his synthetic skin to assume multiple characters, including his former self. A nightmare of a picture, Darkman is as much a product of its Gothic surroundings as Batman was, and it's no surprise whatsoever that Danny Elfman would agree to score the picture. At that period in Elfman's career, the composer couldn't get enough of tragic characters, and his music for those characters was usually as consistent in its symphonic depth as it was in its success. While Darkman is not as well known as Batman and Edward Scissorhands, it contains many of the same basic structures that Elfman fans have come to love from the morbidly tragic scores from that period of Elfman's work. Unfortunately, Darkman also suffers from the effect of using the table scraps from those other scores.

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Everything about Darkman is saturated with the same dense, dark, and determined styles that made Batman a classic the previous year. But like Dick Tracy, another 1990 comic-style score from Elfman, Darkman is less coherent and more heavily reliant on overbearing style over the substance of its thematic ideas. Much of this phenomenon relates to the underlying rhythmic movement of the march that Elfman utilizes for the "Main Titles" theme and the waltz, which becomes more evident in "The Plot Unfolds." The title theme offers all the fascinating desolation and hopeless suffering that we can hope for in the story, and Elfman weaves this theme into his score with dexterity, especially in the short, but haunting "Julie Discovers Darkman" cue. The underscore is highly reminiscent of the motifs used throughout Batman, with "High Steel" combining the bubbling timpani, rapid trumpet blasts, and abundant cymbal crashes and snare rips together with rolling bass string motifs very similar to action sequences in the earlier work. While this music is entertaining at a basic level, its continued obvious use here makes Darkman the most blatant re-hash score of Elfman's career. The best arrangement of this music exists in "Woe, The Darkman... Woe," the concert piece from the score. Two standout cues distinguish themselves from the continuous re-use: both "Rage/Peppy Science" and "Carnival from Hell" play to the carnival atmosphere in the film, with the latter cue serving as an almost intolerably sick interpretation of kiddie carnival music by Elfman (though he predictably lets the chaos of the full symphony eat away at the barrel organ until we're in full horror swing). The score ends with one of Elfman's weaker finales, lacking in any ambitious crescendo or ultimate act of futility. In retrospect, it's very easy for Darkman to slip through the cracks in Elfman's career; there's just so little original material here that the score leaves you seeking its close cousins, all of which are superior to it. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.18 (in 61 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.17 (in 115,373 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.