Buy it... only if you appreciate the modern, synth-loop thrillers that Danny Elfman produced later in the 2000's, in which case Proof of Life is the first, rough-riding venture into the genre.

Avoid it... if you love the fine details of orchestral and melodic color that Elfman usually conveyed in his music at the time, because this score is an almost alien texture by comparison.

Elfman

Proof of Life: (Danny Elfman) Despite the hype generated by the real life romance between stars Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe on the set of Proof of Life, the hostage thriller was an immense disappointment at the box office. Crowe plays a detective and negotiator who is hired by Ryan to help find her husband, who is kidnapped in South America by militant guerrillas. An on-screen romance and perpetual jump from one dangerous situation to another complicate matters. Director Taylor Hackford had worked with composer Danny Elfman on his previous film, Dolores Claiborne, and this time the composer was thrust into a thriller genre that was still new to him at this point in his career. The resulting music was most often described as "difficult" by reviewers at the time, being that it is less saturated with Elfman's traditional styles and therefore more difficult to grasp or appreciate. It is a functional and adequate work, though a bit predictable, and it excels beyond average at certain points throughout the length of the film's plot. On album, Proof of Life presents more challenges than casual collectors of the composer were accustomed to hearing, though Elfman's endeavors in the genre in the later 2000's have largely made this sound a permanent part of his career. In all such cases, its difficult to find solace in Elfman's thrillers, regardless of their accurate emotional emulation of the stories they accompany. The composer's movement towards the brash, electronic edges of the MIDI Revolution in Proof of Life was a disturbing embrace of a mindless trend by an otherwise inventive composer, a trend that has catapulted the careers of many otherwise unknown composers far less talented than Elfman. In these respects, the electronically driven harshness of Proof of Life was perhaps the least recognizable work of Elfman at the time. Even in the just previous music of A Simple Plan and Instinct, there was a stylistic haunting of Elfman's unique touch, led by shadows of minor and major key toils. Proof of Life, on the other hand, could very well have been the work of Don Davis, Marco Beltrami, Larry Groupé, or a dozen other contemporary synthesizer experts.

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The choppy synthetic loops and marginal thematic development of Proof of Life are not the kind of stylistic risks that many had become accustomed to hearing Elfman take. The blend of synthetic percussion is mediocre and uninspired, and its rambling presentation is devoid of true tension. It elevates your pulse using volume and rough textures, a tactic already tiresome from the Media Ventures group at the time (and many years later). The style is a combination of Hans Zimmer's Beyond Rangoon and Elfman's own Instinct, with some pieces of early James Horner heard in the electronics. The only true treat for Elfman fans will be the slight, subtle piano usage that will recall Dolores Claiborne. Alternating between sinister and delicate tones throughout, the music is not engaging. It is mixed to be in your face during "Main Title," with the acoustic bass and percussion rapturing in twisted convolutions, and yet it doesn't actively involve you. It's all mildly interesting during its run, but it remains underachieving in style and theme. The title theme introduced immediately on pan pipes is largely abandoned thereafter, and the piano and acoustic guitar fail to bring any warmth to other ideas that Elfman attempts to inject. The exotic elements of the score, in light of the work's anemic envelopment of the listener, are not up to Elfman's usual level of creativity. Apart from the film, the most interesting moments of the score are those when the acoustics are toned down and mixed evenly with the piano and strings, as most obviously heard in "The Miscarriage" and "The Finale." The cliched ending, pronounced by the pounding of a few bass notes, spin the score backwards into the pot of average, musical stew that Jerry Goldsmith sometimes stirred at the time. On the whole, Elfman had all the basic elements necessary to create a gripping, modern thriller, but his technique with those ingredients is just too opaque to readily enjoy. Most of it takes pages from the libraries of similarly conceived and performed efforts by many lesser-known composers of the era. The love/hate relationship that listeners had with Elfman didn't really apply to Proof of Life, for the score is a rare time when the composer flirts with a concept usually absent from his career: boredom. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.18 (in 61 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.17 (in 115,373 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.