Buy it... realistically only if you were unfortunate enough to sit through this film and were impressed enough by Christopher Lennertz's orchestral music in the last third to merit the redundancy of the entire 52-minute presentation on album.

Avoid it... if you believe that once you've heard one lightweight talking animal film score, you've heard them all, because Marmaduke doesn't try to disprove that notion.

Lennertz

Marmaduke: (Christopher Lennertz) Talking animal films are usually a disgrace aimed at parents trying to figure out what to do with their unruly kids on rainy summer days. As an adult, you can simply pray that the popcorn won't make the kids fat and that there's enough humor aimed at adults to make the two hours barely tolerable. The latter unfortunately wasn't the case with the 2010 adaptation of the 56-year-old "Marmaduke" comic strip by Brad Anderson, a universally bashed live action production that used CGI to animate the talking animals' mouths so that they would match the dialogue. For some viewers, seeing the mouths of all the canines awkwardly move about with the words proved to be a deal-breaker by itself. Others desiring some kind of redemptive plot or amicable characters to relate with were left with a dull excuse for stupid pet jokes and, of course, the same scatological humor that is inevitable in all such horrid pictures. Tom Dey's film did succeed to lure in several reasonably big household names to perform the speaking and live parts, expressively coercing the animals on their way to stardom while peddling organic dog food. They run away, fall in love, find themselves in peril, rescue each other, and generally come to accept their failings at the end. Redemptive acceptance rarely smells so bad. Not only did critics fail to see the point of the predictably boring plotline, but audiences didn't fall in love with Marmaduke either; the film was a short-lived disaster at the domestic box office and required worldwide grosses to have any hope of breaking even. It marked yet another entry in the transition of composer Christopher Lennertz from the realm of television and video games to a reliable workhorse for trashy feature productions. The fiscal success of Alvin and the Chipmunks a few years prior was undoubtedly a catalyst for Lennertz's involvement in the silly animal-related comedies that followed, including Marmaduke and Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. This material is predictable to a fault, the kind of thing you'd expect to hear from Theodore Shapiro, James L. Venable, or a host of others who toil with such wretched assignments. It is music that usually resides one step below the level of John Debney and David Newman's long lists of career entries in this genre, though the highlights of these composers' struggles with things like Marmaduke will sometimes remind film music collectors of the style of the better known composers.

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It's hard to fault Lennertz for basically doing his job for Marmaduke. Giving scores like this one a low rating for all the same reasons that adults find the film insufferable is unfair to the composer. He has proven his chops in several genres now and clearly can handle an assignment like this one in his sleep. There are never expectations of greatness in scores like Alvin and the Chipmunks or Marmaduke, and it's remarkable that they continue to be pressed onto CD despite the relative disinterest from dedicated film music veterans. They are full of short cues, cheap thrills, bursts of parody, and factory-pressed sensitivity of character. Lennertz pushes all of these buttons in Marmaduke, yet another effective but ultimately forgettable children's score. Like most these days, it combines orchestral tradition with the coolness of rock and/or jazz, a necessity given the amount of song placements in most such productions. The orchestra is well rounded and applied in all the right, wholesome ways. Sweeping string themes with brass counterpoint highlight the redemptive portions while piano and solo woodwinds and brass handle moments of deeper contemplation. Accents include acoustic guitar to add even more warmth to the latter scenes and a combination of electric guitar and Hammond organ to let rip with hip bursts of rock in several cues. The score alternates between these two disparate sounds quite haphazardly, the cue "Hang 20" very abruptly switching personality several times with such suddenness that it almost seems as though the cue was badly edited together for the album presentation. As for the strictly orchestral passages, the score's late cues finally offer some sustained, entertaining performances. The convincing personal depth of "Peace Offering/Running Away" yields to interesting shades of threatening tone in "Chupadogra" before more coherent action rhythms in "The Search" and "Saving Marmaduke" all combine for ten minutes of palatable genre material. The score's primary theme, an idea that is a bit generic in a Debney sense, receives notable treatment at the end of "Saving Marmaduke." The recording of the ensemble is remarkably crisp, with the orchestra allowed a wet, reverberating sound while the soloists are clearly discernable up front. Overall, Marmaduke serves its purpose, but makes for a redundant album experience. Ten to fifteen minutes of music from this score would make for a solid presentation, assuming you have any taste for light children's music in the first place. As of 2010, Lennertz still produces far more interesting music in the genre of hideous pop-culture parody films, where he's allowed to branch out into more fruitful, creative directions. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download