Buy it... if you never cease to enjoy all of the predictable variations that cheap Media Ventures adventure and comedy scores of the late 1990's and early 2000's had to offer.

Avoid it... if you expect a strong underlying composition to be arranged and performed with anywhere near the kind of power that it needs to impress.

Powell
Glennie-Smith

Just Visiting: (John Powell and Nick Glennie-Smith) The monumental success of Les Visiteurs in 1993 during the concept's debut in its native France was long a target of translation into the American market. After Miramax and Mel Brooks had terrible difficulty dubbing the 1993 hit into English, Disney eventually assembled most of the major cast and crew for a English-version remake that stayed very true to the original but, in 2001, failed to muster much magic at the box office. The concept of the misguidedly time-traveling knight and the comedy and romance inherent in that plot (and many others like it at the time) revealed themselves to be a phenomenon unique to France. The nonsensical remake degraded the idea to the level of dumb, American franchising. Despite these facts, a perfect match was established between the production and the Media Ventures composing buddies of John Powell and Nick Glennie-Smith. There was an atmosphere so false and ridiculous about Just Visiting that it is fitting that the accompanying score is an auto-pilot Media Ventures effort that, musically speaking, added nothing substantially new to the careers of either composer. From the trailers, film music fans who purchased this score without having seen the film might have assumed that they were destined to hear another comedy routine of Chicken Run proportions (after all, that score remained one of the most popular comedy works of the early 2000's). Unfortunately, while it offers a few impressive passages and is generally listenable throughout, Just Visiting is a less inspiring and cheaper sounding work. Less enhanced by orchestral might and more entrenched in electronic samples two generations away from the Hans Zimmer formula, Just Visiting goes through melodramatic motions without the instrumentation to really make it work. Nevertheless, Powell and Glennie-Smith do go out of their way to provide a score on paper that is likely far more impressive than the film probably deserved.

In construct, the music is emotional at its base and grandiose in stylistic intent. Both the heroic elements of the past and the parody moments of the present are scored with the same over-the-top sense of adventure, likely meant to heighten the comedic parts of the modern day scenes. Even though Powell is clearly listed as seemingly the only composer, a substantial portion of Just Visiting was written by Glennie-Smith, and it is his contribution to the score that often introduces the needed orchestral performances of their compositional ideas. Two other Media Ventures assistants contribute as well. The augmentation with synthesizers is unfortunately present the most when the score needs that tone the least, in the opening sequences of centuries ago. These scenes in England are handled primarily with synthesizers, with token harpsichord and solo woodwind mixes to add a shallow element of locale to the music. The end result of these few cues at the start of the film is a sound that is distractingly corny, which may be appropriate given the ridiculous plot to follow. Once in modern Chicago, the composers' talents with the synthesizers and guitars are better utilized. The rhythmically grooving "Tub for Two" is the sole standout comedy cue in the score, and its silliness is actually a highlight of the album. This track may be more reflective of the film's sense of humor, and yet it is surrounded by many somber cues of extended minor key motifs. Several dramatically conceived cues in the score present a sound that will appeal to fans of Zimmer's more melodramatic, neo-classical works. The choral elements alternate between the synthesized variety and the real thing (recorded in London). The latter group's contribution is infrequent and the synthesized one is, after five years of the same samples at the time, tired and overused. Parts of Glennie-Smith's material has the same aural texture as his work for The Man in the Iron Mask in 1998, a score which itself was already sounding derivative.

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Ironically, it is when Powell and Glennie-Smith transfer the spirit of the score into the realm of pop rhythms that Just Visiting begins to stir some interest. The love theme, introduced appropriately in the past during a short, but lovely acoustic guitar performance in "Rosaline and Thibault," matures into its modern variant in "On the Bridge," where Powell combines the underlying classical string progression with a modern rhythm that leads to a satisfying combination of genres for the score. It's a simplistic realization of what Patrick Doyle provided with more power for Great Expectations; in Just Visiting, the same style is lacking in romantic bite in key parts because of the weak depth of the recording. Chicken Run, by comparison, featured stunning sound quality and an incredible blend of orchestral and synthesized elements into one remarkable package. The music for Just Visiting doesn't sound as crisp, often existing seemingly behind a wall, muting the performance to an extent. Glennie-Smith's cues tend to have better ambience than Powell's, for reasons that are difficult to pinpoint but likely can be attributed to the balance of the mix. The lack of much reverberation added to that mix causes the major themes to lose appeal. The love theme discussed earlier reappears in less interesting forms in "Not a Bunny" and "Julia Sees the Castle." The title theme, provided a glorious performance in "The Hag's Hut" (though with a notable brass flub at 2:14), is revisited frequently throughout the score. While this theme doesn't offer much in terms of enthusiasm, it is the one aspect that ties this score together into a cohesive whole. The most obvious detriments in Just Visiting are those cues that rely so heavily on sparse synthetics in stereotypical Media Ventures staccato rhythms that they sound like a demo recording, including the "The Big Chase," a badly underpowered cue. The song at the end of the album has a dance mix that, for some reason, seems oddly appropriate as a title theme for a 1980's cartoon and is a poor match for the remainder of the material on the product. On the whole, Just Visiting is a marginally enjoyable score that had promise in its conception, but deserved better arrangements at almost every turn. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For John Powell reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.05 (in 38 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.05 (in 42,939 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.