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Review of The Gray Man (Henry Jackman)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you admire heavy synthetic manipulation techniques in
your action and thriller film music, especially if the ticking,
slashing, banging, and thumping effects produce what Henry Jackman calls
"gnarly noise" for this project.
Avoid it... if you hate copy and paste scores that do nothing to advance what minimal conceptual development exists in a drab and tedious musical environment.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
The Gray Man: (Henry Jackman) After ten years of
production delays, 2022's The Gray Man debuted as the most
expensive Netflix movie of all time. Based on a 2009 novel, it is a
pointlessly redundant assassin story that postulates, like dozens of
other equally mindless plots, that there are shadow governments being
run out of American intelligence agencies. Those entities have secret
assassins running around the planet knocking off distasteful people
(except for Vladimir Putin; they never seem capable of something as
useful as that) and, when not killing those against their interests,
they're trying to wipe out each other because of the usual elements of
betrayal. There is absolutely nothing new of value in The Gray
Man, its existence owing to audiences' insatiable desire for
high-tech chases involving capable killers. What matters for this plot
is that there is an American assassin code-named Sierra Six who is sent
to kill a person that turns out to be Sierra Four, who failed his
performance improvement plan, smelled bad too frequently, or had
compromising information about the criminality of a superior in the
chain of command. The whole film involves the agency hunting down Sierra
Six while he and sympathizers try to expose the wrong-doing of those
seeking to silence them. Not much intellect there. The movie did perform
fairly well in ratings, critics shrugging their shoulders along the way.
Brothers Anthony and Joe Russo directed, and they continue their
collaboration with composer Henry Jackman that includes multiple
Captain America sequels and thriller schlock more in line with
The Gray Man. Jackman was in the middle of a hiatus from film
scoring to concentrate on his duties as a new father, but he did squeeze
this project in on the side. He wrote most of the score's key elements
without seeing the picture first, creating a 17-minute concept suite
that he extensively tinkered with over nine months while the film was
being shot. Jackman didn't intend to produce such a long demonstration
of themes, but the extended time playing around with it led to the
unexpected length.
Out of Jackman's initial suite for The Gray Man would come the rest of the score, which is largely a lazy copy and paste job from that initial material. (The composer, to some degree, admits to this procedure in fleshing out the score, but he uses four ghostwriters and an army of orchestrators.) In personality, Jackman affectionately calls this music "gnarly noise," and that description jives with the end result, which is a work that is both gnarly and noisy in some of the worst ways possible. The general tone of Jackman's score is disillusioned and nervous, its action portions largely unlistenable and dramatic warmth almost nonexistent. While the composer's concentration was on generating a disorienting, manipulated mix, there is actually a surprising orchestral presence in a number of cues. An 80-piece ensemble of mainly strings and brass is joined by some high woodwinds, harp, and saxophone, with percussion sounding synthetically rendered in many cases. A significant amount of engineered manipulation using analog equipment is applied to nearly every cue, lowering the pitch of some lines an octave to muddy their tone. The synthetic percussion sounds much like Brad Fiedel's The Terminator scores, and the extremely grating manipulated tones are everywhere on top of that retro foundation. Techniques like backward reverb contribute to make this score very unlikeable music, only one cue, "Missing a Wing," seemingly organic in totality for a nicely compelling change. There are heavily processed cello sounds that are outrageously hideous here, as in "A Timely Intervention," and an alarm siren effect at 1:10 into "Sky High" could induce insanity. Jackman is proud of his months of experimentation to generate these sounds, and yet they do nothing to help this score stand apart because such coloration cannot compensate for music that otherwise lacks any soul or narrative purpose. There are three motifs in the work, the one for Sierra Six most frustrating. Ghostly and distant, descending without any point, the Six theme has no distinct melody to remember, its very unpleasant opening pairs of notes in broken chords almost reminiscent of 1970's atonality. The suite arrangement's version of the theme is simply reprised without any satisfying development in the rest of the score. The Sierra Six theme slowly opens "The Gray Man" on piano and synthetics in extremely vague movements, extends over the work's main action rhythm at 6:16 and 11:27, eventually gaining counterpoint figures, and culminates on brass and then tense strings with more clarity at 12:46. It is copied and pasted in the first minute of "Bangkok" over the action rhythm on eerie synths, takes a slightly more heroic tonality on strings late in "To Kill Your Own," and is reduced to one drawn-out pair of notes at the end of "The Curse." It wanders through "An Old Friend" and "Unstoppable, Uncatchable" on atmospheric synths and continues this stance in "Where's the Target?" but develops some brass style by the end of that cue. The lack of development of any interesting kind for the Sierra Six theme in The Gray Man reveals what a useless character he is. The idea occupies "Unexpected Ally" and early "An Honorable End" in same old, mundane breathiness, and the original suite format returns in "Ghost in the Machine" but adds annoying solo cello lines underneath. Quick allusions early in "Missing a Wing" and fragments informing the ambience of "The Labyrinth" are not satisfying, though Jackman does send off the theme with melodrama on strings in the final minute of "Under the Blood-Red Sun." His action motif is more obvious but less palatable, build upon heavily processed percussion in a 5/4 rhythm. All sorts of obnoxious ticking, slashing, banging, and thumping effects comprise this idea, which is introduced at 2:34 into "The Gray Man." The sudden cutoffs and inverting of reverb are exceedingly terrible, the motif totally devolving into absolute rhythmic chaos at about ten minutes into the suite. It opens "Bangkok" in slap-happy form and blasts to open "Sky High" in rowdy and unlistenable form again. A devolved version achieves some cohesion in the middle of "Tango in Prague," and the theme changes into a more metallic and angrily plucked variant in "Lone Wolf." The idea regularly thumps in action cues throughout the middle of the score and returns to the forefront in the finale, "Always Gray." The villains' theme would be fine in another score, but it is so disparate here that it sounds forced. Its three-note phrases for bold brass raise vintage espionage lines like a bad imitation of Michael Giacchino channeling John Barry or Henry Mancini, and in conjunction with the action rhythm, it even has some 1970's David Shire feel to it, too. The villains' theme of The Gray Man is heard at 14:55 into "The Gray Man" over the action rhythm, borrowing the Barry bad guy technique of getting bigger but not better with every repetition of the melody. To Jackman's credit, this idea is manipulated in the work with more intelligence than the other ideas, with slight allusions to just the chords in "Shades of Gray" and the progressions barely accessible in "Lloyd Hansen" with some vintage jazz tones destroyed by synths. On the other hand, the theme suffers from the worst of the copy and paste moments, the full brass rendition at the end of "Sky High" a simple reprise of the suite. After being used at 1:10 into "A Timely Intervention" for one stinger, the idea makes a cameo in the middle of "Tango in Prague" before playing large at the end of the cue in seemingly the same rendition that closed out the suite and "Sky High." If that's not bad enough, the villains' theme stews early in thumping rhythmic menace of "Against All Odds" but then, once again, closes the cue with yet another copy and paste of the suite arrangement's conclusion. The repetition is plain and annoying. That said, the theme becomes sympathetic on organic strings late in "Missing a Wing" (despite another tiring crescendo to close the cue), is very slight early in "Internal Affairs," and moves nicely to a solo trumpet in "Exoneration" for a touch of cold, lonely redemption. The only other motif of interest in the score is a distorted cello solo in 0:40 into "A Question of Loyalty." Otherwise, the work dissolves into mindless dissonant suspense or outright sound effects only, with no substantial music in most of "The Curse" and "Ensnared." In the end, many listeners will find The Gray Man to be underachieving, but the extent to which it irritates the heck out of you will depend on your interest in the dominant manipulation of the sounds you hear. It's a really unpleasant work beyond its rather mindless constructs and unforgivable copying and pasting. On the other hand, there are actually a few compelling moments from Jackman, and they, not surprisingly, offer the orchestra in its full glory with minimal synthetic hackery of its mix. Between "Missing a Wing," the latter half of "Under the Blood-Red Sun," and the redundant variants of the villain's theme closing out the suite and repeated in "Sky High" and "Tango in Prague," there is enough orchestral merit to avoid the most scathing of ratings for the score overall. Just don't expect The Gray Man to impress much in the remainder of its exceedingly long and tedious album presentation. **
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 80:50
NOTES & QUOTES:
There exists no official packaging for this album.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from The Gray Man are Copyright © 2022, Netflix Music and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 9/17/22 (and not updated significantly since). |
