Buy it... only if you are confident with what you heard in the film.

Avoid it... if you don't care for disjointed, confused, and poorly rendered mixings of Lisa Gerrard's voice, brutally synthetic loops, and unnecessary sound effect samplings.

Gregson- Williams

Man on Fire: (Harry Gregson-Williams) A remake of the 1987 Elie Chouraqui film of the same name, 2004's Man on Fire places Denzel Washington in the role previously occupied by Scott Glenn. In the most recent of a string of tense crime and action thrillers, director Tony Scott updates Man on Fire with all the sensibilities of Bruckheimer-style illogic and a super-artsy, often-blurred cinematography that will hopefully someday soon be banned from Hollywood. If you enjoy seeing Washington's enflamed nostrils in close-ups, then Man on Fire was likely entertaining for you; it fared well at the box office, partly due to the fantastic performances by the lead actors, and spurred considerable interest in Harry Gregson-Williams' score. Fitting a similar mold as other Gregson-Williams' collaborations with Scott, Man on Fire has all the edgy, modern urban atmospheres that lead naturally to the rougher, more synthesized angle of Media Ventures projects of the recent past. Murders, kidnappings, and retribution are the themes of the day, and a little usual Heitor Pereira guitar music for the Latin elements are obligatory, but Gregson-Williams faced his most interesting challenge in attempting to interpolate the harsh action motifs with the soft and tender thematic ideas for the Dakota Fanning character (the young girl kidnapped). It's easy to hear that Scott --whether explicitly or otherwise-- asked Gregson-Williams to pump up the testosterone level for Man on Fire to levels exceeding even the techo-thriller Enemy of the State, for the cues of synthetic looping are brutal in their volume and intent. If you throw in the use of several Latin source songs, a little more non-English work from the ever-popular Lisa Gerrard, some score contributions from other composers, and, as previously mentioned, the softer character themes for small strings and piano, you get the potential for one very muddy end product. And mud is what you get.

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Perhaps Gregson-Williams would have been successful with his conceptual structures for Man on Fire if he had been able to play to lesser extremes at both the action and character ends of the spectrum. The synthesized action cues are truly a degradation to the overall product, stuttering and ripping without any consistent rhythm through several lengthy passages. While it is functional music for a man with revenge on his mind, its inconsistencies on album make the approach very difficult to swallow, certainly not aided by Gregson-Williams' need, for some reason, to insert random rapping, clanging, and distorted vocal sound effect noises that have been so altered by a computer that the end result is frightfully disconnecting. Placing the soft cues for Fanning and Washington in their contemplative moments serves to accentuate this disjointed polarity problem; the soft cues are often very short, most of them hovering around a minute, and with the action cues including sudden jolts of synthesized orchestral hits, often echoing in the distance in that trademark Media Ventures fashion, you can't help but tread through the softer moments with a sense of caution. The Latin source material is consistent within itself, as is Lisa Gerrard's contribution. As phenomena go, Gerrard is on her own planet since Gladiator, and her vocals don't seem to vary much from score to score. For Man on Fire, however, her usually smooth voice has been digitally altered so she sounds as though she's two octaves higher and split into two people... the overlay is grating on the nerves, and her usual slurring of notes only worsens the mixing. Still, the lengthy, nine minute end cue is the reason for much of the interest in this score alone --significantly moreso than Gregson-Williams' solo efforts here-- so perhaps it is not surprising to hear a radio edit of Gerrard's performances with a rather tepid and uninteresting drum loop at the very end of the album. On the whole, Man on Fire has several worthy ideas and occasional potential, but the overall package is disjointed, confused, and suffers from poorly rendered mixings of Gerrard's voice and totally unnecessary sound effect sampling by Gregson-Williams. Seek this only if you are confident with what you heard in the film. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Harry Gregson-Williams reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3 (in 29 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.1 (in 46,826 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.