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| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
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1. Nim's Island 2. The Life Before Her Eyes 3. Horton Hears a Who! 4. Leatherheads 5. The Spiderwick Chronicles | . | . |
1. Moulin Rouge 2. Gladiator 3. POTC: Curse of the Black Pearl 4. Star Wars: A New Hope 5. Edward Scissorhands |
6. Pearl Harbor 7. Schindler's List 8. Titanic 9. Braveheart 10. Home Alone | . | . |
1. Varèse Sarabande 25th 2. The Last of the Mohicans 3. Legends of the Fall 4. Schindler's List 5. LOTR: Return of the King (Set) |
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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if there is no limit to the amount of sampled rhythms and sampled sound effects that you enjoy from the early days of the Media Ventures library. Avoid it... if you expect the memorably sorrowful theme for the primary character in the film to occupy any more than two minutes on album. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Without a doubt, The Replacement Killers was not the kind of score that would make anyone hold out hope for the Hans Zimmer pupil. It was about this time in 1998 that film music critics, worried about the midi revolution that Media Ventures was starting to cause in the action and adventure scoring genre, began to uniformly blast these largely synthetic scores. A score like The Replacement Killers represented everything ominous about where Zimmer was taking the genre, offering studios that inexpensive score thanks to the absence of payments to an orchestral ensemble. Sometimes, these scores were passable. Other times, they simply exposed themselves as cheap crap, and this was the case with The Replacement Killers. Gregson-Williams wrote a competent theme for the John Lee assassin. It is one saturated with the loneliness and sorrow of the profession, with a hint of longing and a slight ethnic edge in its performance. Some carry-overs from Zimmer's Beyond Rangoon are added for the pinch of ethnic spice needed for the character; an electric cello and flute both contribute to the solitary theme and, along with some high range percussion, these elements provide the necessary elegance to counter the overbearing bass and synthetic strings otherwise washing out the theme and, frankly, everything else in the score. The irony of this theme is that it only appears once on album, with only two minutes of its performance at the outset. After that, it's never to be heard from again. But in the film, many of the scenes of reflection and repair between Yun-Fat and Sorvino feature this theme, giving the story a fighting chance of having an actual, identifiable theme (even as understated as it is). Unfortunately, the remainder of the score is completely unorganized trash. And this doesn't make sense, especially when you have a clearly delineated theme for a character's whose persona makes the film. The relentless chase music is so generic in its use of sampled sound effects and sampled voices over sampled rhythms that there's no point in even trying to describe it. At times, it approaches the cohesion of Crimson Tide, but most of the time, its bass region is so overwhelming that speaker damage is not out of the realm of possibilities. Skip the score and watch the film.
Music as Heard on Album: * Overall: *
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