Buy it... if you specifically recall the music from the film and enjoyed certain parts of its various styles.

Avoid it... if you expect a cohesive action score with distinct genre boundaries and a compelling development of style.

Blanchard

Inside Man: (Terence Blanchard) It might be surprising to many movie-goers to watch a Spike Lee movie that has very little editorial content, but Inside Man is about as straight an action/drama movie as you can get. Robbers take over a Wall Street bank with the contents of a single safe deposit box in their interest, and four distinct parties are placed in constant motion around the heist: the owner of the bank who wants the contents of the box concealed at all costs (Christopher Plummer), the well-connected broker/negotiator he hires to strike a deal with the robbers (Jodie Foster), the morally ambiguous but incredible sharp detective trying to outsmart the robbers (Denzel Washington), and the cops who want to free the hostages by storming the building (led by Willem Dafoe). The cat and mouse antics of the robbers and lead detective remain intelligent from start to end, and with a cast of such reliable talent, it's hard to figure where Inside Man might disappoint. Generally, reviews and popular response to the film have been positive, though a few questionable holes in the plot and the absence of any extraordinary element has caused Inside Man to be labeled as "entertaining but unremarkable." For Spike Lee, only a few occasional snippets of social commentary enter into the mix, a surprising turn towards straight-laced action for the controversial director, and in the same regards, the score by veteran black jazz musician Terence Blanchard also attempts to play towards mainstream action.

Partly because of his distinct talents and partly because of his ethnic sensibilities, Blanchard's music often holds characteristics unique to his scores, with his hits soaring with elegance (Eve's Bayou) and his misses sometimes toiling in the realm of the bizarre (The Caveman's Valentine in parts). For Inside Man, Blanchard would produce exactly the same kind of score relative to his career that Lee would produce for his own directing credits: something entertaining but unremarkable. One of the scores that came to mind when Inside Man was announced was Graeme Revell's Out of Time from a few years ago (also starring Washington and with the score released by Varèse Sarabande). That previous score oozed with sophisticated ethnic suspense, an inherent sense of "coolness," and a listenability that one would expect more from Blanchard than from Revell. But Blanchard, while occasionally inserting a touch of jazz or rhythm & blues styles into his smaller cues, takes a much more mundane, conservative action stance for Inside Man. At its best, this score starts scratching at the doors of Carter Burwell's Conspiracy Theory, but never lets loose with the same appealing pizzazz. Comparisons here will be plentiful, as Blanchard incorporates many of the same chord progressions as Burwell's popular theme, especially in his final cues of Inside Man. Solo piano work in low ranges here is also reminiscent of Conspiracy Theory. The more unexpected and perhaps disappointing element of Blanchard's score is the common action figure heard in the opening cues.

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Almost serving as leftovers from James Newton Howard or Graeme Revell's stock urban action drama scores, the title theme for Inside Man, aside from sharing common note progressions with half a dozen Trevor Jones scores, is stale in its performances, suffering from a lack of spirit that sometimes plagues Basil Poledouris scores in which the writing on paper deserves a performance far more vibrant than it receives. Echoing trumpets in "Hostage Takedown" are a variant on Jerry Goldsmith's Patton technique. Slower character-building sequences in the middle of the score share slower tempos and easy chord progressions with John Barry's tepid Mercury Rising. Some of Blanchard's own stylish rhythm work pokes through in more modest cues, but even these feature deep brass accompaniment that take a page or two from Conspiracy Theory. For "Nazis Pay Too Well," Blanchard incorporates a faux-classical string quartet that sounds nothing less than bizarre when performing the film's title theme. The following cue zips into more light percussion and electronics rhythms under brass accompaniment, exemplifying the identity crisis from which the score suffers. On the whole, this music is all over the map, and as much interesting talent as Blanchard exhibits on a regular basis, it might have been more fruitful had he resisted the temptation of a standard orchestral action score and infused the film with some consistent high stakes jazz or other genre-bending style that would cater to his abilities. The album ends with a decent A.R. Rahman/Hindi song from 1998 (with Irish-laced rap interludes! Caramba!), sending the listening experience in yet another completely different direction. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download