Buy it... only if you appreciate John Ottman's ability to make the functional music possible against difficult odds, even if that material doesn't translate into the most engaging listening experience on album.

Avoid it... if you require distinctly memorable character to emerge from a very limited scope and restricted instrumentation for the suspense genre.

Ottman

Trapped: (John Ottman) With a well-rounded cast, Trapped tells the story of an abduction for ransom in which an unstable criminal (Kevin Bacon) and his wife (Courtney Love) trap two parents in separate locations while a third accomplice kidnaps their daughter. The mental breakdown of Bacon's character through the course of the film, as well as the strong emotional bond between the kidnapped girl and her mother (Charlize Theron), help the film deviate from the normal course of ransom films. Ultimately, though, too many familiar patterns sunk any prospect of success for Trapped, a circumstance that also afflicted its score by composer John Ottman. Taking a greater quantity of scoring assignments for films below the mainstream radar, the composer worked on more projects in 2002 than he had in any other year in his career to date. The quality of those productions, both on the big screen and on cable television, were often suspect (although it's difficult to qualify Eight Legged Freaks with any general descriptor because it was so intentionally bad), and Ottman would fortunately follow with a strong pair of major projects in 2003. For the 2002 psychological suspense thriller Trapped, Ottman was tasked with utilizing his creative talents to compensate for a tiny music budget. The initial inclination for the personality of the score involved the typical fright and flight approach, pounding and screeching with terror while providing dissonant material for the majority of the interim. But both Ottman and director Luis Mandoki agreed that this stereotypical sound would be out of place in Trapped, and the two men followed an agreeable evolution of ideas when considering the more harmonious approach that could be applied for the emotional appeal of the film. No matter Ottman's intended result, however, he didn't have much to work with. Due to budget constraints, the film continuously dropped source music, putting a greater burden on Ottman to conjure up original material for elements in the film as specific as cartoon jingles heard on a television screen in the background of a scene. A sudden, last minute addition of a main title cue brought the recording to 85 minutes in length. With four weeks to compose and only 17 hours to record, Ottman was limited to 20 orchestral players. The majority of musical instruments, therefore, would have to be simulated and performed electronically by the composer himself.

	Only $9.99

If Ottman had proven one thing as a certainty in his early career efforts, however, it was an ability to write creative music and suffice with less than perfect recording ensembles and venues. In addition to his synthesizers, Ottman utilized a piano, a few woodwinds, and some strings for the bulk of his effort, and with this small group in mind, Ottman wrote a score that very rarely relies on loud strikes of the instruments. The most notable explosion of typical horror writing comes as a frightening surprise in the middle of "Abduction," following what was had been a pleasant, relatively upbeat set of cues affirming the bond of the family. One of Ottman's two themes for the film is designed to build upon that family connection, established with the piano (the traditional instrument of the suburban household), while the other was meant represent the primary criminal (Bacon) and his mental collapse. The latter theme would eventually be adopted as the primary theme of the film as Ottman was asked to score more reels of the project. In later tracks, the suspense builds moderately though the use of tense strings and rumbling bass on the synthesizers, but Ottman maintains a remarkable flow of rhythm and heartfelt emotion throughout the score. It's not melodic up front, but it isn't pounding in intensity either, allowing the action and dialogue on screen to speak for itself. This somewhat hands-off approach to scoring the more obvious emotions of the film assists the work in avoiding the pitfalls of most horror efforts, but at the same time, lulls the listener of the score alone to sleep. Ottman pulls off an authentic, functional score given the circumstances, except perhaps for the final "Crazy Rescue" cue on album, which exposes some of the keyboarding and electronic percussion as two-dimensional and a bit flat. The constructs are intelligently formulated, but the limited scope and restrained instrumentation cannot be compensated for by Ottman's prickly array of creative sound effects. In some cases, as in "Paralysis," it seems like the composer was attempting to mirror Jerry Goldsmith's synthetic-dominated suspense and horror scores of the era, succeeding to an extent but carrying with that sound the same mundane atmosphere. A generous 65 minutes on album is simply too much material to sustain your interest, and it could be combined by the listener with the similarly-minded Lake Placid on the same album without any significant transition. It's hard to fault Ottman for his workmanlike approach to Trapped, but the score simply can't justify its long album presentation. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For John Ottman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.22 (in 32 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.03 (in 17,523 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.