This is part of a series.
- Here’s the prior post on various 2024 scores - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=139254
- If you want the full set of links, click on my profile.
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For Henry Jackman and his former assistant Dominic Lewis, 2024 was a year of unfortunate attachments to underperforming content. Henry’s return from his parenting hiatus came on Dwayne Johnson’s fantasy action-comedy Red One about Santa’s bodyguard teaming up with a hacker to rescue a stolen Santa Claus. Reuniting with his Jumanji franchise director Jake Kasdan, Henry gave it the Christmas-adjacent version of what he’d done for those earlier films, again resulting in a thematic and technically proficient score that oddly lacks staying power. Likely that’s because, as Jackman once said, you have to write around the jokes, though given the movie’s tepid critical reception and commercial performance perhaps it’s more fair to say he had to write around the attempts at jokes this time. With the Russo brothers using Alan Silvestri on their upcoming movie and onetime collaborator Matthew Vaughn seeming to have pivoted to Lorne Balfe on a full-time basis, it remains unclear where Henry will go next. Dominic Lewis meanwhile got to team up once again with director David Leitch on the blend of stunt-heavy action, rom-com, investigative hijinks, and movie-about-moviemaking called The Fall Guy, a film whose disappointing box office - curious in part because it had two of the stars of the prior year’s cultural smashes Barbie and Oppenheimer - likely prevented Lewis’ score from getting broader attention outside of film music fans.*
*A middling reception to Kevin Hart’s Netflix actioner Lift probably also masked Lewis’ far less essential but occasionally quite cool score for it.
In 2022 the pairing of Leitch and Lewis resulted in the Christmas action joys of Violent Night and the utterly bananas original music for Bullet Train, the latter a thrillingly all-over-the-place score for some and a whiplash-inducing madhouse for others. While The Fall Guy is definitely a more coherent effort that doesn’t quite teeter on the edge of insanity in the same way, it also thankfully didn’t lose any of its predecessor’s sense of style. Mixing rock, retro keyboards, a variety of sampled sounds and percussive effects, the composer’s own wailing vocals, and occasionally orchestra (most notably during its nearly 10-minute finale, a masterpiece of climactic action scoring that came about after a temp full of “adrenaline guitar stuff just wasn’t working”), the resulting composition seemed to what would’ve happened if Michael Kamen and Harold Faltermeyer had a baby with that baby then being raised by Mark Mancina and Trevor Rabin and spending a lot of its life listening to 1970s rock 'n' roll as well as the music that influenced Dominic’s recent funky score for Kaleidoscope. Dominic later admitted his early drafts went too far in the Faltermeyer direction, pigeonholing himself into an 80s cop comedy sound “too specific” for this film, and ultimately it required a few months of experimentation to align on the right mix of styles.
It would’ve been one thing if his score was just a masterclass in main theme variation, with Dominic putting his deceptively simple idea through the wringer from rock riff to stinger to ostinato to long-lined heroic versions near the climax; the composer arguably nailed the Ryan Gosling character redemption / resurrection arc better than the rest of the film did. But - as with Bullet Train - Dominic was also weaving in song elements into his score, in this case extensive variations on the opening guitar riff and the chorus melody of the Kiss song I Was Made For Lovin’ You (each element frequently interacting with the score’s main theme), with the composer later saying part of his role on a Leitch film is finding ways to “get the feeling of a needle-drop but tell a story way better than a needle drop can.” Dominic even got into the song game a bit with an “80s film love ballad” written at the director’s behest that informed the film’s love theme and also ended up in the end credits; Dominic said they tried finding a spot for it elsewhere in the film but it was “was too on the nose.” The cherry on top was Dominic’s subsequent Unsung Heroes song that with its hilarious lyrics doubled as a stealth middle finger to the Academy for not formally recognizing stunt work over the years. “Antagonistic, but in fun.”
In an era where rock-influenced scores for fight-heavy films often seem to aspire to be little more than sonic wallpaper, The Fall Guy, a modern action music classic and one of the more impressive multi-genre fusion scores in recent memory, showed there was a better path and that you didn’t have to sacrifice an ounce of coolness by relying on extroverted themes. “There’s a lot of stereotypical action music out there. I don’t enjoy doing that. This stage in my career I’m really trying to do action in a different way.” How Dominic Lewis managed to weave in so much Kiss - a band he called “the perfect combination of cool and kitsch” - without putting his score into high camp territory should be studied in schools, though for what it’s worth the original version of the script originally called for a lot more of the band’s music appearing throughout the film (proving perhaps that maybe there actually can be too much of a good thing).
The Fall Guy - ***** - Dominic Lewis; add’l music by Daniel Futcher; orchestrated by
Stephen Coleman, Andrew Kinney, Tommy Laurence, Geoff Lawson & Michael J. Lloyd;
ass’t orchestrators Sean Barrett, Benjamin Hoff, Steven Rader & Jamie Thierman;
conducted by Gavin Greenaway; score programmers Hal Rosenfeld & Tom Skyrme;
score technical engineer Yuheng Yan; featured vocalist Dominic Harrison (Yungblud)
Red One - ***½ - Henry Jackman; add’l music by Antonio Di Iorio, Maverick Dugger, Evan Goldman,
Alex Kovacs & Anthony Willis; lead orchestrator Stephen Coleman; orchestrated by Andrew Kinney,
Geoff Lawson & Michael J. Lloyd; Laufey orchestrated by Hal Rosenfeld; add’l orchestration by
Brett Bailey; conducted by Gavin Greenaway & Ben Parry; vocalist Grace Davidson
Lift - *** - Dominic Lewis & Guillaume Roussel; add’l music by Forest Christenson &
Jake Staley; orchestrated by Tommy Laurence & Geoff Lawson; conducted by
Gottfried Rabl; synth programming Tom Skyrme; score technical engineer Yuheng Yan
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Next time:
- “Oh no, we don’t have it at all.”
- “My workload quadrupled.”
- “The word iterative has never been used more in my life than in the last two and a half years.”
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