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FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of Die Hard With a Vengeance (Michael Kamen)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... on the 2012 expanded album only if you are prepared for a
mind-numbingly long and arduous listening experience despite the fact
that this product necessarily replaced the hideously awful 1995 album,
neither of which offering an easy presentation of the recordings made by
Michael Kamen for this film.
Avoid it... if you're hoping that Kamen could exceed the quality of Die Hard 2 by providing significantly fresh original themes and structures for a score-crucifying director who basically refused to allow such evolution.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Die Hard With a Vengeance: (Michael Kamen) One of
the few actors who could out-class Alan Rickman in his battles with
Bruce Willis as John McClane is Jeremy Irons, and the latter sinisterly
portrays the brother of Rickman's famed villain, Hans Gruber, in Die
Hard With a Vengeance. The 1995 blockbuster hit is the third in the
Die Hard franchise and finished as the highest grossing film for
that year at the worldwide box office. Irons' character, Simon Gruber,
is a ruthless criminal mastermind determined to seek revenge against
McClane for killing his brother in the original 1988 film. He forces
McClane (and a comedic sidekick in the form of Samuel L. Jackson) to
play idiotic games (with eye-rolling dialogue associated) that lead the
police officer across New York while Gruber conducts a massive gold
heist underneath the city. Terrorist bombings, infrastructure damage,
and threats to kill school children are among the poor behavior
witnessed in the plot, and in the unfortunately discarded original
version of the script for Die Hard With a Vengeance, Gruber
actually succeeds in escaping. While not as cohesively entertaining as
the previous two films in the franchise, the return of director John
McTiernan to the concept yielded several individually encapsulating
scenes of suspense and action. Also accompanying McTiernan in his
reunion with McClane was the director's unconventional methodology when
it came to constructing the film's soundtrack. Composer Michael Kamen
was good sport about incorporating McTiernan's chosen outside source
material directly into the structure of his score for Die Hard,
and he had to maneuver around the symphonic poem "Finlandia" by Jean
Sibelius in Die Hard 2: Die Harder. For the third film, McTiernan
returned to idea of applying traditional melodies (along with a plethora
of songs) to the movie, ranging from the popular Civil War song "When
Johnny Comes Marching Home" to pieces by Brahms and Beethoven that have
less of an impact. It's no surprise that even Wagner made it into this
work.
Just as "Finlandia" became the de facto theme of the prior film, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" is the identity of Die Hard With a Vengeance, applied liberally throughout the picture and over the end credits. Also at play are the several pop, rap, and R&B songs employed to add flavor to the New York locale, led by The Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City." The rap and R&B songs address the Harlem environment more specifically, marking the first time in the franchise that the soundtrack's songs don't reflect the tone of the score (or vice versa). The highly problematic original album release for this soundtrack sprinkles these songs, along with the very long classical pieces and Alexander Mosolov's "The Iron Foundry," amongst the few score cues that were finished by the time of its assembly. Not all went smoothly between McTiernan and Kamen in the production of Die Hard With a Vengeance, however. The composer's original score was reportedly rejected by the director, the latter instead choosing to use material from the first two films to fill the gaps in between the non-original placements. Kamen did eventually write a replacement score for at least a substantial portion of the film, incorporating the melody of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" into several cues. Perhaps the greatest irony of these circumstances is the fact that much of what Kamen eventually provided for the final cut of Die Hard With a Vengeance sounds remarkably similar to his approach to Die Hard 2. Aside from the obvious usage of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," there is no substantial new theme for the third film, only a more ominous variation on the original film's suspense motif punctuating the Simon Gruber character with anything remotely fresh. Unlike the previous entry, there is no actual original theme that is new to this work, though some of the prickly rhythms for the airport villains do persist here. The primary theme of the franchise, reduced by Kamen from six notes to four throughout the previous film's score, continues in its hapless representation of McClane here. Its performances are appropriately tired and spread a bit more thin than in Die Hard 2, where it seemingly had a more heroic role. The most extensive manipulations of the franchise's main theme come early in Die Hard With a Vengeance, especially in "Goodbye Bonwits," a cue of six minutes that is noteworthy for accomplishing practically nothing. The same could be said for a number of the conversational and suspense cues in Die Hard With a Vengeance. The most noteworthy moment in the score comes perhaps in "Waltz of the Bankers," in which Kamen cleverly alludes to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" from the first film in a very dark tone, musically acknowledging this movie's connection to Hans Gruber. The "Ode to Joy" references do pop up in several places, one of which the culmination of borrowed sources in "Infiltration," with "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" and a snippet of Richard Wagner thrown in as well. Likewise, "Ode to Johnny" is an impressive combination of various villains' identities with the main theme of the franchise, and "No Rush" is a dash of humor in an otherwise bleak soundscape. Otherwise, if you thought that the music for Die Hard 2 was nebulous in its often lifeless extension of the first film's motifs and structures, then this score will likely impress you even less. Kamen ultimately wrote several hours of music for the film, and what's astonishing is how consistently loyal to the prior scores it is, all the while never really attempting to take the franchise's identities in any evolutionary direction. Maybe that is why McTiernan eventually threw so much of it out and re-arranged it haphazardly. The urban tones of "Taxi Chase" were applied to several places in the film, as were the adaptations of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," leaving an absolutely huge portion of Kamen's music totally unheard or, in some cases, nonsensically placed. Gone were most of the composer's best action statements using the franchise theme. At least the massive quantity of music written by Kamen (which, for whatever reason, seems to lose quality control as it progresses chronologically) gave the director a generous library of finished orchestral music to work with, even though McTiernan confessed that the orchestral approach was not one he felt best for this movie's grittier urban atmosphere. Given all of this mess, perhaps it is no surprise that there never has been and probably never will be a truly satisfying album release of music from Die Hard With a Vengeance. The absolutely wretched 1995 commercial product from RCA/BMG is so awful that it doesn't even include a track listing on its packaging. It contains 28 minutes of score but omits Kamen's most important music, including all but one of the action cues and most of the major performances of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." Some of this lack of cohesion owes to the fact that Kamen was still recording the score (or its replacement) up to the last moment, and the material was simply not ready for pressing on a CD at the time the product had to be finalized. Thus, there is no music from the latter half of the film to be heard there. Some of the score cues presented are alternate versions of those heard in the film, and the 25 minutes of classical covers at the end are largely irrelevant and very poorly performed. Less than one fourth of the music that Kamen wrote for this film (when including the rejected material) is represented on this album, and that is in part why it holds absolutely no value on the secondary market. While Kamen's score isn't spectacular, it deserved better than this terrible product, and in 2012 La-La Land Records finally took the trouble to assemble most of what was available onto a 2-CD set containing two and a half hours of almost entirely Kamen score. To call this listening experience arduous would be an understatement, the incessantly militaristic tone and a lack of really sophisticated transcendence of any of the franchise's musical motifs making the product one of significant difficulty to endure. That said, there are many moments during this set that will increase your level of respect for Kamen, who according to several accounts handled McTiernan in stride and really toiled with his re-writes to meet the director's demands. The adaptations of the franchise's established motifs are revealed to be many on this set, and it's disappointing that McTiernan latched onto a subset of lesser ideas from the score and simply repeated them in the final cut. That said, some of Kamen's cues are truly awful, and the pair of "Escape" and "The Foundry" is mind-numbingly obnoxious. The set is fantastic for intellectual study, and in that sense, it was a necessary and valuable release for film score collectors, even with its somewhat constrained ambient sound quality. But whereas the 1995 album had too little material from Kamen to enjoy, the 2012 set offers simply way too much. Somewhere in between exists an hour-long compilation of the score's best moments in a solid presentation. A growling Jeremy Irons quote or two might do wonders as well. As is, expect your brain to receive a battering.
TRACK LISTINGS:
1995 RCA/BMG Album:
Total Time: 66:06
2012 La-La Land Album: Total Time: 153:56
* previously unreleased ** contains previously unreleased music
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert of the 1995 RCA/BMG album includes no extra information about
the score or film. That of the 2012 La-La Land set contains extensive notation
about both, though the booklet is so thick that it's difficult to extract it from
the jewel case and then return it there.
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