Buy it... only if you're a sucker for stale, predictable orchestral action music for an equally formulaic film.

Avoid it... if you seek any kind of redeeming element to elevate this otherwise competent score beyond the rest of its tired class.

Debney

Sudden Death: (John Debney) No less than a dozen films could trace their inspiration back to the original Die Hard, including its sequels. It seems that every venue has been taken over by terrorists, from battleships to trains, and in 1995, the time came for a professional sports team stadium to be taken hostage. In this case, it's the home of the Pittsburgh Penguins and the setting is game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals. The John McLane-style hero is Jean-Claude Van Damme, accepting yet another demeaning role that allows him to kick a fellow human being in the head, although Sudden Death is so bad that he actually gets to suit up and play on the ice at one point, too. Director Peter Hyams has a knack for exciting action and chase sequences, and Sudden Death has its fair share of those, but the screenplay's dialogue and totally illogical leaps, along with a supporting cast that doesn't really seem to care about any of the proceedings, relegated the project to the depths of despair so treacherous that you don't even see the film on late night cable re-runs very often anymore. Nothing about the film suggests nuance, and unless you're a fan of Van Damme himself, Sudden Death is a painfully dumb waste of a few hours. With almost everyone involved with the picture seemingly on autopilot, it's no surprise that composer John Debney provides a score that pushes all the buttons without really accomplishing anything spectacular itself. Debney was just beginning to make a significant impact on the film scoring world in 1995, with his score for Cutthroat Island raising a flurry of deserved interest. It was with much excitement that the succeeding Sudden Death gave listeners another opportunity to hear the composer's action skills. Unfortunately, there is about as much inspiration in Debney's writing here as there is in Van Damme's facial expressions. The composer has completed many projects like this in the following years, with his diligent workmanship attitude providing temp-happy sounds to nearly any kind of project.

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Perhaps Sudden Death didn't deserve anything more than this kind of basic accompaniment. Debney certainly has offered far more unique ideas. The one thing this score has going for it is that Debney's avoids simply rehashing the temp tracks and manages to write a score that sounds unique, despite all of its individual elements pointing to tired structures from other action scores. You often hear Debney collectors refer to Sudden Death as an exhibition of the composer in the same autopilot mode as Jerry Goldsmith was in for similarly poor projects at the same time. For Sudden Death, Debney's themes are stale and limp, stated without resolve in a handful of the action cues. No attempt to really adapt this theme into the suspense or dramatic underscore cues is made, leaving it hanging in fragments during most of the action. The piano's low ranges represent the personality of the score, striking the ominous tones at the outset of the film and providing thunderous contributions to the action rhythms. A variety of light percussion and high range metallic, synthetic sounds present the predictable rhythmic base for "Finding the Bombs" and a few other cues involving explosives. The mass of the score is driven by stock action music, often imitating Goldsmith and Michael Kamen. For the larger chase sequences involving the stadium as a whole, Debney cranks up the rhythms with a consistent timpani and low-range synthetic pulsation, but he rarely lets loose with a satisfying, harmonic statement of motif. Simple strikes, orchestra hits, standard horror slashes, and a rather poor imagination with the brass cause most of the action material to meld into the background. The only breaks in the nonstop bombast are the occasional crescendos of string majesty, heard briefly in "Seeing Tyler" and "Rooftop Battle," mirroring the sound of Basil Poledouris' work for similar formula films. The project could really have used more of this dramatic pull, but Debney dutifully earned his paycheck by accompanying the tired action scenes with appropriately generic action music. Overall, Sudden Death is basically competent, but stale at every turn. **   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.