Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,708
Written 12/28/09
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Buy it... if you appreciated the driving energy of Mark Mancina's
score for Speed and seek a natural, more orchestral evolution of
that sound (along with some genuinely spirited reggae personality for
the two leads).
Avoid it... if you detest what filmmakers Jerry Bruckheimer and
Michael Bay have done to the intellectual expectations of blockbuster
film music, in which case Bad Boys serves as a frustrating marker
of origin for that sound.
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| Mancina |
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| Glennie-Smith |
Bad Boys: (Mark Mancina/Nick Glennie-Smith) And so, the blockbuster of
the late 1990's and 2000's was born. The Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael
Bay phenomenon's origins date back to 1995's Bad Boys, a
production low on cash that compensated for its shortcomings in budget
and script by relying upon all the same MTV-Bay techniques that
eventually became voluntary. Without any worthwhile story whatsoever,
Bad Boys required flashy shooting angles and rapid cuts, as well
as comedic banter between its two stars, and these necessities
eventually became the standard of excellence for a series of Bruckheimer
and Bay films to follow (all of which gaining only marginal critical
acceptance but, more importantly, grossing enough from dumb audiences to
keep such films in the pipeline). Much of Bad Boys owes to
previous buddy cop films, Lethal Weapon primarily, and it started
as strictly a Disney comedy. Upon moving to Sony, Will Smith and Martin
Lawrence were plucked from their sitcoms, along with fellow small screen
favorite Tea Leoni, and Bad Boys suddenly became not only
ethnically diverse, but also a bigger action extravaganza.
Unfortunately, despite all of Bay's clever techniques (and Leoni's
outfits), Bad Boys had too many slow scenes and thus allowed
audiences too many interludes during which to engage the logical parts
of their brains. A sequel in 2003 (featuring most of the original
players) eventually teased some more grosses out of the concept, though.
Eventually stepping away from the sequel for artistic reasons was
composer Mark Mancina, for whom Bad Boys was his second summer
blockbuster in two years. It's undoubtedly ironic that Mancina
contributed so much to the invention of the "Bruckheimer musical sound"
(aided by his mentor, Hans Zimmer) and yet grew so tired of the generic
nature of that sound that he ultimately wouldn't continue to reduce it
for Bad Boys II. His hiring for the 1995 film resulted from
Bruckheimer's noticing of Mancina's Speed from the previous year,
a score that was tracked significantly into Bad Boys. Despite
Bay's desire for a continuation of that sound (going with Trevor Rabin
for the sequel), Mancina, with the help of Nick Glennie-Smith, was
determined to give Bad Boys its own personality. The resulting
reggae influence on the work does distinguish it from Con Air and
the plethora of similar imitators that followed. Unfortunately, Bad
Boys is still likely so rooted in the comfort zone of the Media
Ventures convention that only collectors of that style of late 90's
bombast will appreciate it out of context.
Regardless of the individual accents in Mancina's work
for
Bad Boys, the score remains derivative. It's a shame that the
inspiration for the title of the film, the Inner Circle reggae song
heard on the "Cops" television show, couldn't have been integrated into
the score, because almost everything else in the work sounds, in
retrospect, unoriginal. The title theme is the source of the score's
coolness, an appropriate reggae rhythm (complete with forcefully exhaled
vocals) leading to a pair of six-note phrases that proves itself
malleable throughout the score. The adaptations of this theme are,
unfortunately, presented in the choppy, staccato fashion that had
cheaply drummed up excitement in the more synthetically grating
Speed, reinforcing a budding trend that Zimmer himself would
perpetuate through the 2000's. The progressions will be familiar to
listeners of
Speed and
The Rock as well, which doesn't
help. A light acoustic guitar theme for the more heartfelt interactions
between the leads (and leading ladies) is standard Mancina material,
pretty though anonymous. This idea doesn't make any impact until the
score is in its second third, reducing its overarching effectiveness,
though its piano-led performance in the last thirty seconds of the film
(the resolution) are as lovely as anything in Mancina's career. Mixed
haphazardly into all of the action scenes is a combined rhythm and
melody that was intentionally crafted from the James Bond mould,
utilizing the Monty Norman theme's first three rhythmic guitar
progressions and utilizing some of John Barry's bloated brass harmony in
slower tempos during climax shots (as in "Hanger Shootout"). These
references are indeed obnoxious, but given the nature of the film and
the low expectations that accompany any score for a Bay film,
Bad
Boys is quite respectable in its merging of these three ideas.
Glennie-Smith's structural contribution to them, despite all of the
score's documentation, remains unclear. The balance between harmonic
orchestral lines and the slapping percussion expected for the genre
keeps the score listenable, even if lacking much true identity. Praise
is owed to Mancina's insistence of employing the orchestra for the
primary role of filling aural space in
Bad Boys; while the
electronics do sometimes interfere with the symphonic performances (of
no less than 80 string and brass players), electric guitars and
keyboarded elements are typically placed in supporting accent roles.
Some of the editing techniques force the orchestral recordings into
sounding synthetic in parts, and this processed sound is another key
signature of a typical Media Ventures score. Once available only in
bootleg form as a result of an isolated DVD track,
Bad Boys was
eventually given an official, 70-minute pressing of 3,000 copies by
La-La Land Records in 2007, and this generous album will satisfy any
collector of music from Bay's breakneck films.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
Bias Check:
For Mark Mancina reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.27
(in 15 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.11
(in 10,875 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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