Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... only if you are a die hard fan of Kamen's work and are devoted enough to the film to warrant an expensive purchase of a hopelessly out of print, collectible album. Avoid it... if you enjoyed the film, but are expecting the few moments of memorable material you recall from its soundtrack to compensate for an otherwise mundane composition and extremely unsatisfying sound quality. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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. *** Track Listings:
Total Time: 74:27
* instrumental version performed by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn All artwork and sound clips from Die Hard are Copyright © 2002, Varèse Sarabande. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 3/20/03, updated 3/21/09. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2003-2005, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
