Buy it... only if you have appreciated the texture and tone of Graeme Revell's synthetic and organic blend in the 2000's, a sound contributed to by the composer of this score.

Avoid it... if an abundance of electronic manipulation of sampled sounds, stock dissonance from distorted rhythmic elements, a marginalized orchestra, and anonymous themes are a recipe for a totally mundane thriller score.

A Perfect Getaway: (Boris Elkis) In an age during which potential audiences can (and regularly do) look up movie spoilers on the internet, it's surprising to continue seeing productions come out of Hollywood that are solely built upon a single massive twist in the screenplay. Then again, with a film as predictable as David Twohy's A Perfect Getaway, perhaps all you need to see is the trailer to make an educated guess about which young couple is murdering other young couples in the picturesque jungles and beaches of contemporary Hawaii. The script of the 2009 film is built to toy with the audience using clues as to the true identities of the major characters involved, though just in case the audience is too dumb to realize what has happened when the twist actually happens, Twohy spends a lengthy period of time going back and summarizing the film in flashbacks. From there, anyone impressed by the first two thirds of the film will likely find the final chasing of the last third to be somewhat mundane. A cast with a fair amount of sex appeal helps things along, as does the beautiful cinematography of Hawaii (a state that certainly won't have a happy tourism department upon viewing this film), but with a story so transparent, A Perfect Getaway, despite its strong marketing campaign from Rogue Pictures, will probably be all procedure and no substance for viewers expecting an engrossing thriller. Unfortunately, film music collectors may look upon newcomer Boris Elkis' score the same way, aiding the film in its basic, primordial sensibilities without really tackling it with (admittedly undue) intellectual thought. Elkis is a name that may be familiar to Greame Revell enthusiasts. The young, Russian-born composer has operated a sound design studio in Los Angeles for several years and has served as a frequent programmer for Revell's more electronically-aimed scores of the 2000's. The synthetic textures he provided to Revell's scores are evident in his own solo work, which ranges from a small handful of obscure feature projects to episodic television show material. Undoubtedly, A Perfect Getaway is Elkis' debut in the mainstream of solo film scoring, an assignment contributed to by the fact that Twohy had associated with Revell for many of his own high profile projects. Revell could not accept this one due to scheduling conflicts. Not unexpectedly, the somewhat exotic score that Elkis provided for A Perfect Getaway is not unlike what one would have expected Revell to have written (especially with similar library effects), a fact that has inherent benefits and detractions.

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Similar scores from Revell in the past have often relied upon a forceful blend of synthetic and organic sounds, employing an orchestra as only a tool with which to lend depth to his array of electronic keyboarding and sampled effects. Elkis' music for A Perfect Getaway is really no different, utilizing the same general formula to create a safely conservative (and, for some listeners, totally mundane) soundscape for this story. The presence of the City of Prague Philharmonic in this recording is a bit deceptive, because outside of some unremarkable string lines in the background (along with a few stock horror techniques involving plucking and the likes), the ensemble makes only a minor dent in the otherwise solid electronic ambience. Various grating sounds, some imitating percussion while other distorting brass effects, exist in slapping rhythms of dissonance. The obnoxiously synthetic tone of some of the action cues, punctuated by the nearly intolerable "Nick Resurrection," defies the location of the story. Female vocal effects are equally out of place. The subsequent cue, "Nick & Cliff Fight," allows rips of electric guitars to take the score in a twisted rock direction, though with nearly every effect manipulated in some way throughout A Perfect Getaway, the score defies classification into any genre other than metal thriller. Elkis does create and revisit some thematic material, starting with a sequence of two-note figures of suspense (heard immediately in "A Perfect Getaway") and later exploring a more fluid variation ("Mall Flashback" and "Man in Full"), but these ultimately related progressions are so understated in the score that they have little memorable impact. One aspect of the music for A Perfect Getaway that deserves some discussion in relation to the plot involves Elkis' decision not to try to fool the audience with the tone of his initial cues. There is significant disillusionment early in the work, including a "Wedding" cue that should raise a red flag immediately in its reservation, and only for a brief respite in "The Island" will listeners be relieved from the immediate pressure of the suspense environment. In other words, Elkis doesn't make an attempt to misdirect the viewer with any sense of genuine happiness in his score. The three primary couples in the story, for instance, are not given the kind of musical identity to specifically assign them a red herring definition. At the end of the day, A Perfect Getaway is an adequate thriller score that could have easily dropped the orchestra and sufficed with an even lower budget. A lengthy album offers some glimmers of hope, but anonymous themes and an abundance of generic suspense and action material in the middle traverse little new ground. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download