Buy it... only if you are well aware of John Barry's tendency to write stagnant, romantically pleasant music for nearly all of his 90's scores, regardless of its inappropriateness for the individual films.

Avoid it... if you expect either suspense music as varied as that heard in Barry's The Specialist, or any of Carter Burwell's replacement action music.

Barry

Mercury Rising: (John Barry) Among a large group of failed thrillers released in the first half of 1998, Mercury Rising is a conspiracy film supported only by its own unique premise. To test its best new encryption codes, a shadowy American communications agency (NSA) places a crossword puzzle featuring the code in a magazine aimed at geeks and, to their surprise, the code is broken by a young autistic boy. The government, in its infinite gratitude, dispatches assassins to eliminate the boy and his family. Right on cue, FBI agent Bruce Willis shows up to save the boy and lead him on a predictable and somewhat boring chase through the rest of the film. Paper thin character development is in order, with Mercury Rising existing really to show Willis playing the kind of underdog character that suited him best in the 1990's. The production was not a success, and one of the elements of the film that sent the producers and studio into a panic was John Barry's score. By the late 1990's, Barry's career was finishing on a distinctly sour note. With his music failing to adapt and flourish in new assignments (and a sense that he was simply repeating the same tired style of his 80's scores for whatever reason), Barry was suffering from a much slower demand for his services than just five years prior. Many of his scores in the late 1990's would be questioned or rejected by his employers, leaving one of the era's most popular and prolific composers with no remaining future. Mercury Rising would be one of Barry's final scores, and parts of it were, not surprisingly, rejected. As post-production of the film reached a close, the studio hired Carter Burwell to ghostwrite six action cues where Barry's music had failed to muster any energy. Being a Barry fan in his youth, the experience was difficult for Burwell, though he made a concerted effort to write music that used some of the standard instrumentation and rhythmic devices that have defined Barry's career, thus easing the overall flow of the music in the film. The studio had made it clear, however, that if Burwell turned the offer down, they were determined to seek out another composer to replace Barry.

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One quick listen to the short album for Mercury Rising immediately exposes Barry's score as indeed an underachievement. He centered his efforts around the theme for the boy, and "Simon's Theme" thus dominates the score with tender, woodwind-led tones that could easily be confused with Barry's Swept from the Sea just prior. As a method of identification with the boy, this theme is sufficient, though Barry collectors will quickly draw parallels between this theme and other family-related scores in his recent past, most notably My Life. His habit of repeating each section of a theme twice is actually abandoned to some degree, with those fragments altered frequently to form a more fluid theme. But this theme is still trademark Barry, not to be mistaken with any other composer's work. String layers with conservative brass accompaniment are once again providing the mass of the substance. When this theme is transferred to sax later in the score (leading to a remarkably romantic performance in the final cue), whispers of Barry's great scores in the ranks of Body Heat are faintly evident. Unfortunately, as you would expect, Barry's action and mystery motifs are heavily recycled; they lack the same tone of malice heard in either the later James Bond scores or The Specialist, and it's hard to imagine how this music would have worked in the film to any degree. The usual thunderous piano strikes in a bass octave are repeated as the only genuine method of signaling suspense. A promising set of progressions late in "Rooftop Arrival" are perhaps Barry's best representation of the government forces, but this motif is never again utilized. Burwell's contributions aren't heard on the 30+ minute commercial album, mostly because the product was already in its finished stages when Burwell was recording his replacement cues. But any avid film music collector will be able to immediately notice his six cues in the film; while he does match the woodwind and percussion use to Barry's, his employment of electronics exposes his work by contrast. These cues aren't of a quality grand enough to merit a search on the secondary market, though there have been several leaks of these cues. The Barry music for Mercury Rising ranges from pleasant to non-offensive on album, and lackluster in the film.

Score as Written for Film: **
Score as Heard on CD: ***
Overall: ***

Bias Check:

For John Barry reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.87 (in 23 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.71 (in 20,820 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.