Buy it... if you enjoy punishing yourself and your wallet with a foolish need to maintain a complete collection of a respected composer's works.

Avoid it... if you hate dumb sports films with equally dumb sports parody soundtracks, especially when only a few of the best songs in the film make it onto the album.

Debney

The Replacements: (John Debney) This film is so insulting to both facts and integrity of the American game of football that you have to wonder if screenwriter Vince McKewin truly knew absolutely anything about it. The Replacements is a football comedy about the 1987 NFL players' strike in which Keanu Reeves plays a scab quarterback on the losing end of a career while coach Gene Hackman and team owner Jack Warden lord over the unfortunate proceedings. With so little respect for the sport, there is no kind way to avoid saying that this film sucks. To its credit, though, the producers of the film spent a enormous wealth of money to garner the rights to parade dozens of well known songs over the speakers during the film. Many of them are sports related, but more importantly, they all represent a certain defiant, in-your-face attitude that the film obviously wanted to exploit. Movie-goers who saw the film came away with this decent collection of songs fresh on their mind and immediately flocked to buy the soundtrack. What they found on the album release, however, was an absurd score by John Debney and only one or two of the songs that they really wanted. Thus, after selling well at record stores initially, the album for The Replacements became a frequent occurrence in used CD bins at the time. From a film score enthusiast's perspective, if you would have been told a few years back that John Debney would eventually score a Gene Hackman sports film, you might have had thoughts about an inspirational effort along the lines of Jerry Goldsmith's Hoosiers. Unfortunately, The Replacements is about as far from Hoosiers in quality as you can get. Squeezed in between the massive array of famous songs is actually a substantial Debney score. Unfortunately, it is so unlistenable that it borders on embarrassment. Even if the tone of the score doesn't drive you mad, the wild inconsistencies in style from cue to cue will. Debney foreshadowed this kind of score with his more interesting and readily enjoyable work for the IMAX film about Michael Jordan just a few months prior. Many of the genre-bending, pulsating, electronic techniques carry over, but in The Replacements, Debney takes them to almost parody levels.

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As you might expect for a film as dumb as The Replacements, Debney goes off the deep end experimenting with harsh techno rhythms and speaker-busting electronics, often producing music that is simply intolerable to the ears. His merging of straight rock with techno, dance, electronica, rap loops, and sound effects is as brutal as his imitation of stock Media Ventures keyboarding at times. This is definitely a score that Trevor Rabin should have tackled. Mixed into this explosive sound are echoing quotes from the film, pounding percussion, orgasmic cheerleaders chanting, screeching guitars, and backwards edits seemingly inserted by a madman. For good measure, Debney throws in both a main theme and an orchestra. The stale, heroic theme is introduced in "The Replacements Remix" and, with its light orchestral exploration in "Falco" and "Martel Crossed," it actually does stick to your memory. The four or five minutes of orchestral material on album is extremely subdued, however, with only a lonely horn performance of the theme at the end of "Martel Crossed" providing any reward. The ripping rock score, which occasionally strays into funk territory to address the personalities of individual characters, was co-written in parts by two members of the group Font 48, and their material is largely a smoother extension of Debney's solo work for the project. Ultimately, Debney responded to an idiotic film with an equally idiotic score, and so the paycheck he collected was well deserved. The album, however, fails for an entirely different reason. While film score collectors really don't like hearing the following statement, this soundtrack needed more songs and less score. Debney's work for the project certainly won't appeal to the Cutthroat Island crowd of his fans, nor will it be of any interest to those who wanted the songs they heard in the film. "I Will Survive" (used prominently in the trailers), "Rock and Roll II," and "Bust a Move" are the only appealing songs for that crowd, and yet the album is missing the majority of other key entries, including "Heros" by David Bowie, "Blinded by Rainbows" by the Rolling Stones, "Ziplock," by LIT, "We Will Rock You" by Queen, and "Every Move You Make" by The Police... The list goes on. So, in the end, this album won't satisfy anyone. The Debney score is intolerable in many parts and the important songs are all missing. A bust all around! *   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For John Debney reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.23 (in 49 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.01 (in 42,775 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.