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

Avoid it... if re-hashed James Horner ideas lifted directly from other scores in his past would simply irritate you, as would the grossly disparate 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 in 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 post-production of the film 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. Making the picture even muddier was the studio's hiring of Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins rock band to write and perform music for cues throughout the film. Given Howard Shore's substantial works in the genre of urban thrillers, it's difficult to understand how the score eventually became an obvious emergency job by Horner, combined with the completely irrelevant music of Corgan. No matter who wrote the score, the script of Ransom would involve much introversion while the two main stars of the film play their intellectual cat and mouse game. It's a "thinking man's suspense score," with occasional bursts of energy as the hero and villain meet a few times under duress. From Horner, the resulting score is a drawn-out exercise in meandering underscore, 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 previous Horner works into Ransom in an attempt to rectify the direction the film had seemed to take with Shore's music. What the listener gets in the end is a Horner score that is little more than easily identifiable pieces of Horner music from previous works strung together for a make-shift score in Ransom.

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The most general similarities between Horner's Ransom and previous works would tie into Clear and Present Danger; the title theme for Ransom would follow 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 are 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 ultimate self-rip-off. The title 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 clunks from Thunderheart are heard. In other cues, the alternating woodwind (previously sax) 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 cues early on, 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 nothing 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 album, and here it is best ignored if possible. As for Horner's work, Ransom represents the ultimate self-rip-off work, 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 to pass by. **

Bias Check:

For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.12 (in 89 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.34 (in 158,769 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.