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| Barry |
Mercury Rising: (John Barry) Among a large group of
failed thrillers released in the first half of 1998,
Mercury
Rising is a conspiracy film supported only by its own unique
premise. To test its best new encryption codes, a shadowy American
communications agency (NSA) places a crossword puzzle featuring the code
in a magazine aimed at geeks and, to their surprise, the code is broken
by a young autistic boy. The government, in its infinite gratitude,
dispatches assassins to eliminate the boy and his family. Right on cue,
FBI agent Bruce Willis shows up to save the boy and lead him on a
predictable and somewhat boring chase through the rest of the film.
Paper thin character development is in order, with
Mercury Rising
existing really to show Willis playing the kind of underdog character
that suited him best in the 1990's. The production was not a success,
and one of the elements of the film that sent the producers and studio
into a panic was John Barry's score. By the late 1990's, Barry's career
was finishing on a distinctly sour note. With his music failing to adapt
and flourish in new assignments (and a sense that he was simply
repeating the same tired style of his 80's scores for whatever reason),
Barry was suffering from a much slower demand for his services than just
five years prior. Many of his scores in the late 1990's would be
questioned or rejected by his employers, leaving one of the era's most
popular and prolific composers with no remaining future.
Mercury
Rising would be one of Barry's final scores, and parts of it were,
not surprisingly, rejected. As post-production of the film reached a
close, the studio hired Carter Burwell to ghostwrite six action cues
where Barry's music had failed to muster any energy. Being a Barry fan
in his youth, the experience was difficult for Burwell, though he made a
concerted effort to write music that used some of the standard
instrumentation and rhythmic devices that have defined Barry's career,
thus easing the overall flow of the music in the film. The studio had
made it clear, however, that if Burwell turned the offer down, they were
determined to seek out another composer to replace Barry.
One quick listen to the short album for
Mercury
Rising immediately exposes Barry's score as indeed an
underachievement. He centered his efforts around the theme for the boy,
and "Simon's Theme" thus dominates the score with tender, woodwind-led
tones that could easily be confused with Barry's
Swept from the
Sea just prior. As a method of identification with the boy, this
theme is sufficient, though Barry collectors will quickly draw parallels
between this theme and other family-related scores in his recent past,
most notably
My Life. His habit of repeating each section of a
theme twice is actually abandoned to some degree, with those fragments
altered frequently to form a more fluid theme. But this theme is still
trademark Barry, not to be mistaken with any other composer's work.
String layers with conservative brass accompaniment are once again
providing the mass of the substance. When this theme is transferred to
sax later in the score (leading to a remarkably romantic performance in
the final cue), whispers of Barry's great scores in the ranks of
Body
Heat are faintly evident. Unfortunately, as you would expect,
Barry's action and mystery motifs are heavily recycled; they lack the
same tone of malice heard in either the later James Bond scores or
The Specialist, and it's hard to imagine how this music would
have worked in the film to any degree. The usual thunderous piano
strikes in a bass octave are repeated as the only genuine method of
signaling suspense. A promising set of progressions late in "Rooftop
Arrival" are perhaps Barry's best representation of the government
forces, but this motif is never again utilized. Burwell's contributions
aren't heard on the 30+ minute commercial album, mostly because the
product was already in its finished stages when Burwell was recording
his replacement cues. But any avid film music collector will be able to
immediately notice his six cues in the film; while he does match the
woodwind and percussion use to Barry's, his employment of electronics
exposes his work by contrast. These cues aren't of a quality grand
enough to merit a search on the secondary market, though there have been
several leaks of these cues. The Barry music for
Mercury Rising
ranges from pleasant to non-offensive on album, and lackluster in the
film.
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- Score as Written for Film: **
- Score as Heard on CD: ***
- Overall: ***
| Bias Check: |
For John Barry reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.85
(in 27 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.54
(in 28,653 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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