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Die Hard: (Michael Kamen) You can't help but marvel
at the fact that
Die Hard somehow worked out brilliantly in the
end. To fully appreciate the film and its music, you have to know about
the disastrous production stories of both. Before audiences rose up and
cheered
Die Hard on to the highest levels of action genre
excellence, the movie was slated to be a total flop. The trailers for
the film were so poorly received that subsequent previews for it
appeared without Bruce Willis, the unknown star, featured in a single
frame. Willis plays the smart-talking John McClane as an everyday cop
turned hero, facing impossible odds against a force of highly motivated
German thieves who have taken over a nearly completed skyscraper that,
appropriately, was about to serve as the real life headquarters for the
film's studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The studio was convinced that
Die Hard would die a quick and complete death, and that lack of
confidence led to several problems which would effect the handling of
the score for the film. Producer Joel Silver had worked with composer
Michael Kamen for
Lethal Weapon, and Kamen's exciting new sound
(combining an orchestra with rock elements) was in high demand in films,
on television, and for pop stars and their bands. Unfortunately, due to
the considerable butchering of the final edit of
Die Hard as
panic set into the last stages of production, Kamen's score was chopped
into little bits and rearranged. Some of his material did not even make
the cut, replaced by cues from John Scott's
Man on Fire and James
Horner's
Aliens (the latter an irony in that it was also hacked
to death when inserted into its original context). Instead of using the
full score, the director and editors took a handful of Kamen cues and
simply looped them over and over again for several scenes. Nevertheless,
when the film became a hit, collectors demanded Kamen's score on album.
And yet, for fifteen years, that treatment never came. The demand for
Kamen's music for
Die Hard was fierce, too. Bootlegs abounded,
and fans rushed to record stores to buy the "Michael Kamen's Opus"
compilation album in the late 1990's just to get a few minutes of a
theme from the film (arbitrarily renamed "Takagi Dies").
That demand was always a bit puzzling, because the
score for
Die Hard has never been as classic as the film it
accompanied. In fact, the score is remarkably pedestrian when heard out
of context, perhaps giving legitimate basis for its significant
rearrangement in the final cut. Even as it was heard in the film,
portions of the score were distracting, and its personality was nearly
completely overshadowed by the use of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" to
represent the evil, calculated Hans Gruber (played by the delightful
Alan Rickman), his Germanic thugs (with a touch of humor, of course),
and the song "Let It Snow" throughout (and in fully vocalized form at
the end). There is indeed a six-note title theme for
Die Hard,
heard best on strings in "And If He Alters It?," though only the first
four notes of the idea are really memorable. The best extension of this
idea would interestingly come from Marco Beltrami in his music for
2007's belated franchise continuation,
Live Free or Die Hard.
Otherwise, Kamen's score is defined a repeated, pseudo-oriental riff on
acoustic guitar and lightly jingling bells representing the holidays
(again, humorously). The remainder of the score consists of blurts from
the lowest registers of the ensemble, lengthy sequences with the
plucking of strings, and themeless progressions that occasionally strike
some intriguing notes (as in "Going After John Again") but are otherwise
anonymous. Together, these are a marginally sufficient representation of
the Nakatomi Plaza and the hide and seek game within, but the score does
finally kick it into a higher gear for its final two notable score cues.
In "The Battle" and "Gruber's Departure," Kamen finally increases the
intensity. The assault on the building is highlighted by relentless
snare rhythms, and although Kamen never intended for the latter cue to
be used in this circumstance, the brass blasts unleashed as Gruber falls
to his death in slow motion are perhaps the score's most memorable
moment. What many fans of the film readily forget is that the great
majority of
Die Hard's plot consists of cat and mouse suspense.
As McClane eludes his would-be killers and conducts his attempts to
contact the police, the score follows the same low-key path that it did
when the terrorists first secured the building.
With this final point in mind, Kamen's music for
Die
Hard doesn't translate well onto album. Only once the party really
begins, and the Plaza is under siege by an ineffectual police and FBI
force, does Kamen's score begin to hold its own. Even during the climax
of the film, as the vault of the Plaza is opened by the terrorists,
Kamen's music continues to take a back seat to his own re-recordings of
"Ode to Joy." Overall, the weak first and middle portions of this score
functioned basically in the film, sometimes as sound effects, but
otherwise the film might have succeeded with out it. Even the more
creative cues in these sections, such as the fake Western-theme that
Kamen conjures up to represent the "Roy" alter-ego of McClane, are
understated. The final two cues will be redemptive for many listeners,
however. This assault material saves the score from mediocrity,
providing fifteen minutes of very strong, orchestrally dynamic and
effective music both in film and on album. In the end, however, it is
Kamen's lack of a memorable theme for the McClane character that
restrains the
Die Hard score. The "Ode to Joy" use was so
identifiable with the terrorists that McClane, musically speaking, is
inherently the viewer's second favorite. In any case, Kamen's work was
finally released on a legitimate CD album in 2002 as part of the limited
Varèse Sarabande Club, with only 3,000 copies available. The
77-minute presentation substitutes the song at the end for a disparate
instrumental version of "Let It Snow." What fans may also forget is that
the master tapes for the
Die Hardrecording were never very clear
to begin with. The sound quality is muffled at best and nearly
unlistenable at worst. So poor is the soundscape that not even a good
remastering could give this recording a sense of life, and that
important aspect of the album should serve as another warning flag to
casual listeners. Given the fact that Varèse's
Die Hard
release fell out of print and immediately fetched prices undeserving of
its contents should make any fan weary of the hype that many generated
in regards to the product. The label did an excellent job of re-ordering
the cues and providing Kamen's work in the best possible fashion, but an
overrated score with poor sound quality cannot be overcome by even the
best album presentation.
***
| Bias Check: | For Michael Kamen reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.22 (in 9 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.41
(in 30,243 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The limited edition Varèse Sarabande album has its usual
standard of excellent, in-depth analysis of the score and film.
