Buy it... only if you already have James Horner scores like Unlawful Entry and Once Around on your shelves, because Jack the Bear resides comfortably as a cross between the two.

Avoid it... if you expect all your dramatic scores from Horner to pull at the heart strings, because the low volume and lack of spirit in this score fail to accomplish that task.

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Jack the Bear: (James Horner) The 1993 film Jack the Bear was director Marshall Herskovitz's attempt to add another compelling entry to the genre of films involving suburban family hardship from the perspective of a child. Despite featuring a reasonable cast, a serious subject matter, and a top flight composer for the score, Jack the Bear failed for a number of reasons, most of which related to the unnecessary move by the writers to shake the story up with Nazi undertones and other violent and unnecessarily scary scenes. For what was originally a heartfelt tale about a son saving a father from the depths of despair, the film became fragmented with too many sensational and unexplained twists. None of this ultimately helped James Horner's score, which suffered an equally tepid response from film score fans. Even as late as 1993, Horner was still actively involved in smaller projects; at the time, his well known scoring assignments were mixed with several back shelf films that had shown promise in pre-production but faded quickly upon release in the theatres. Utilizing a small orchestral ensemble and an array of synthesizers, Horner produced a score of a minimal nature that relied heavily on the solo performances of the violin, piano, and flute to convey pleasantly harmonic ideas. The famed composer was no stranger to the concept of understated dramatic scores at that time in his career. His smaller scale efforts often fell into two categories: first, those that contained a theme, motif, or instrumentation that endeared the work to the hearts of fans and therefore thrived (Sneakers, Thunderheart, Searching for Bobby Fischer) and second, those scores that fell through the cracks because of their lack of memorable attributes in the minds of the majority of Horner's fans (Once Around, To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday, Class Action). Undoubtedly, Jack the Bear falls into the latter category, with enough endearing qualities to be effective in context, but offering very little to distinguish itself in a career that has pulled so effectively on the heart strings on other occasions. This is a work that has "auto-pilot" written all over it, despite some interesting moves by Horner to slowly develop the primary thematic idea over the course of the film.

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Perhaps the most shunned score of the 1990's for Horner remains Unlawful Entry, which meanders in a synthetic soundscape that is largely unlistenable outside of its two thematic performances for even the most hearty Horner collectors. In its darker moments, such as the synthetic cue "Dylan's Gone," the score for Jack the Bear suffers from some of the same uninteresting, droning style as Unlawful Entry. Hidden in between, however, are several short performances of a theme that would eventually be fleshed out by the composer in Deep Impact. It's conveyed first by the piano and then by the flute, with sporadic performances by a solo violin interspersed. Most of this theme's airtime exists in the second half of the score, first introducing itself in full during "Flashback" and eventually occupying much of "Resolution & End Title." A secondary theme, exhibited at the very start, is less interesting, as are the synthetic and slight orchestral cues of underscore in between. The scarier parts of the film drag Horner out of the otherwise perpetual major key for a series of two-note progressions that accompany the Nazi element. The use of a bass harmonica to accentuate these darker moments is intriguing, but not memorable. Ultimately, the darker plot elements cause several cues to lose the delicate and harmonic edge maintained by the rest of the score, creating consistency problems. As a result, Jack the Bear is a score with perhaps fifteen minutes of thematic material that devoted Horner fans might have interest in, though nothing contained in this work would go unexplored by significantly larger ensembles in subsequent scores of the 90's. At the end of the decade, Jack the Bear was one of only five or six officially unreleased Horner scores of the 1990's, but Intrada Records presented it as the third installment of its "Special Collection" series in 2001. Intrada did an exemplary job of mastering the music to an extent that had never been heard in the numerous fragments that had appeared on bootlegs through the years. Some of the material is so subdued, however, that you might not notice a satisfying difference between the two. Unless you are a die-hard Horner fanatic with Unlawful Entry already on your shelves, you'd likely be better served by investigating one of Horner's more creative small-scale works of the early 1990's. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.13 (in 98 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25 (in 184,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.