Buy it... only if you're a Smashing Pumpkins fan and are seeking Billy Corgan's 25 minutes of rocking, bone-headed score on the album.

Avoid it... if re-hashed James Horner ideas lifted directly from a plethora of other scores in his past would simply irritate you, not to mention the grossly disparate and painfully insufferable music from Corgan.

Horner

Ransom: (James Horner/Billy Corgan) Based on the same screenplay by Richard Price and Alexander Ignon that inspired the 1956 Glenn Ford movie of the same name, Ron Howard's Ransom of late 1996 places the director in exactly the genre at which he excels the most: group tension. The film was somewhat of a success, with the script perhaps needing two or three fewer loose ends, and Mel Gibson's performance is often credited for Ransom's appeal. The story offered the angry actor the opportunity to delve in a role that suits him best, seeking answers in an agitated state and ultimately trying to take the law into his own hands. The post-production of the movie wasn't free from hiccups, and one late-arriving piece of news was the rejection of composer Howard Shore's score for the film. Howard turned to previously scheduled collaborator James Horner with only a little over two weeks to spare until the score had to be dubbed into the film. At least Horner didn't go "Troy" on Shore's work and publicly trash the composer's capabilities in the industry. Making the situation for Ransom even muddier, though, was the studio's hiring of Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins rock band to write and perform music for several cues throughout the film as well. Given Shore's substantial work in the genre of urban thrillers, it's difficult to understand how his music eventually became an obvious emergency job by Horner, not to mention some replacement by the completely irrelevant music of Corgan. No matter who wrote the score, the script of Ransom involved much introversion while the two main stars of the plot play their intellectual game of cat and mouse. It's a "thinking man's suspense score," with occasional explosive bursts of energy as the hero and villain meet a few times under duress. From Horner, the resulting score is still mostly a drawn-out exercise in meandering ambience, while Corban's music fails to make any sense whatsoever and deserves practically no credit in either this review or the film itself. On Horner's part, it's easy to get the impression that Howard had tracked several cues from the composer's previous works into Ransom in an attempt to rectify the direction the film had seemed to take with Shore's music. What the listener hears in the end is a Horner score that is little more than easily identifiable pieces of his music from previous works strung together to supply a make-shift soundtrack for Ransom.

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The most general similarities between Horner's Ransom and his previous works tie into Clear and Present Danger. The main theme for Ransom follows the same patriotic rise of chords, performed by strings and piano with brass counterpoint that is almost identical. A heroic and harmonically satisfying performance of the theme at the end of the closing credits, complete with tolling chimes, pounding timpani, and crashing cymbals, is ironically what Clear and Present Danger could likely have better used. The second Horner cue on the album ("Delivering the Ransom") is almost perfect for study by a composition student, for it successively takes entire pages of music from four previous Horner scores and combines them into one massive regurgitation of ideas. The main theme slurs its notes with the same twist that Horner employed in Sneakers. Descending notes tapping their way down to the start of a rhythm denote the same "change in scene" tactic heard in Clear and Present Danger. Pulsating snare rhythms are reminiscent of Apollo 13 and distant piano thuds and other various clunking sounds from Thunderheart are heard. In other places, the descending woodwind (previously saxophone) theme from Commando makes an entrance in the opening cue. Wildly rambling piano, clicking rhythms, and more snare are another extension of Apollo 13 in "The Quarry." After those two early cues, Ransom hibernates until the finale. A light woodwind theme continues to twist notes in Sneakers fashion in "A Two Million Dollar Bounty," and the previously mentioned finale, "The Payoff," takes a page or two of chaotic writing from Aliens. The Billy Corgan cues were minimized in the film for good reason, but they still occupy 25 minutes on the latter half of the Ransom album. The grungy band performances in these cues have the same intelligence in structure as their track titles and share absolutely no characteristics with Horner's music. Obviously an attempt by the studio to mass-market the Ransom album, Corgan's contribution would be a disgrace to any orchestral score product, and here it is best ignored if possible. As for Horner's work, Ransom represents what some critics could deem "the ultimate self-rip-off," but given that he had only two weeks to manipulate temp tracks into a new work, you have to cut him some slack. As a listening experience, however, the Ransom album presents nothing really interesting in Horner's half and nothing worth tolerating in Corgan's half. This is definitely an album for which no ransom should be paid. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.13 (in 98 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25 (in 184,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.