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Perhaps Gregson-Williams would have been successful with his conceptual structures for Man on Fire had he been able to play to lesser extremes at both the action and character ends of the spectrum. The largely synthetic action cues truly degrade from the overall product, stuttering and ripping without any consistent rhythm through several lengthy passages and utilizing some of the nastiest samples and manipulation techniques available. While it is functional music for a man with revenge on his mind, its inconsistencies on album make the approach very difficult to swallow, certainly not aided by Gregson-Williams' need, for some reason, to insert random tapping, clanging, and distorted vocal sound effects that have been so altered by a computer that the end result is frightfully disconnecting. Some of this music, like "The Rave," is understandable as quasi-source material. Placing the soft cues for the girl and her bodyguard in their contemplative moments serves to accentuate this disjointed issue with polarity; the character cues are pretty and, in some cases (as in "You Are Her Father"), evocative, but they are also often very short, most of them hovering around a minute in length. With the action cues including sudden jolts of crashing samples and vague orchestral force, echoing through the soundscape in trademark Zimmer/Media Ventures fashion, you can't help but tread through the softer moments with a sense of caution. The Latin source material is consistent within itself, as is Lisa Gerrard's contribution. As phenomena go, Gerrard was on her own planet since Gladiator, and her vocal style didn't seem to vary much from score to score thereafter. Some nearly identical progressions in her part of "The End" will be distracting for all but the most ardent Gladiator fans. For Man on Fire, however, her usually smooth voice has been digitally altered so she sounds as though she's two octaves higher and split into two people; the overlay is grating on the nerves, and her usual slurring of notes only worsens the mixing. Still, her co-written, nine-minute cue is, far more than Gregson-Williams' solo efforts here, the reason for much of the interest in this score, so perhaps it is not surprising to hear a radio edit of Gerrard's performances with a rather tepid and uninteresting drum loop at the very end of the CD album. This track was initially not available on the download-only version of the album, though a few extra score tracks were. On the whole, Man on Fire has several worthy ideas and occasional potential, but the overall package is disjointed, confused, and suffers from poorly rendered mixings of Gerrard's voice and totally unnecessary sound effect sampling by Gregson-Williams. Seek it only if you are confident with what you heard in the film.  **   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Harry Gregson-Williams reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.94 (in 35 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.99 (in 51,968 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

Total Time: 64:54