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| Horner |
Ransom: (James Horner/Billy Corgan) Based on the
same screenplay by Richard Price and Alexander Ignon that inspired the
1956 Glenn Ford movie of the same name, Ron Howard's
Ransom of
late 1996 places the director in exactly the genre at which he excels
the most: group tension. The film was somewhat of a success, with the
script perhaps needing two or three fewer loose ends, and Mel Gibson's
performance is often credited for
Ransom's appeal. The story
offered the angry actor the opportunity to delve in a role that suits
him best, seeking answers in an agitated state and ultimately trying to
take the law into his own hands. The post-production of the movie wasn't
free from hiccups, and one late-arriving piece of news was the rejection
of composer Howard Shore's score for the film. Howard turned to
previously scheduled collaborator James Horner with only a little over
two weeks to spare until the score had to be dubbed into the film. At
least Horner didn't go "
Troy" on Shore's work and publicly trash
the composer's capabilities in the industry. Making the situation for
Ransom even muddier, though, was the studio's hiring of Billy
Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins rock band to write and perform music for
several cues throughout the film as well. Given Shore's substantial work
in the genre of urban thrillers, it's difficult to understand how his
music eventually became an obvious emergency job by Horner, not to
mention some replacement by the completely irrelevant music of Corgan.
No matter who wrote the score, the script of
Ransom involved much
introversion while the two main stars of the plot play their
intellectual game of cat and mouse. It's a "thinking man's suspense
score," with occasional explosive bursts of energy as the hero and
villain meet a few times under duress. From Horner, the resulting score
is still mostly a drawn-out exercise in meandering ambience, while
Corban's music fails to make any sense whatsoever and deserves
practically no credit in either this review or the film itself. On
Horner's part, it's easy to get the impression that Howard had tracked
several cues from the composer's previous works into
Ransom in an
attempt to rectify the direction the film had seemed to take with
Shore's music. What the listener hears in the end is a Horner score that
is little more than easily identifiable pieces of his music from
previous works strung together to supply a make-shift soundtrack for
Ransom.
The most general similarities between Horner's
Ransom and his previous works tie into
Clear and Present
Danger. The main theme for
Ransom follows the same patriotic
rise of chords, performed by strings and piano with brass counterpoint
that is almost identical. A heroic and harmonically satisfying
performance of the theme at the end of the closing credits, complete
with tolling chimes, pounding timpani, and crashing cymbals, is
ironically what
Clear and Present Danger could likely have better
used. The second Horner cue on the album ("Delivering the Ransom") is
almost perfect for study by a composition student, for it successively
takes entire pages of music from four previous Horner scores and
combines them into one massive regurgitation of ideas. The main theme
slurs its notes with the same twist that Horner employed in
Sneakers. Descending notes tapping their way down to the start of
a rhythm denote the same "change in scene" tactic heard in
Clear and
Present Danger. Pulsating snare rhythms are reminiscent of
Apollo
13 and distant piano thuds and other various clunking sounds from
Thunderheart are heard. In other places, the descending woodwind
(previously saxophone) theme from
Commando makes an entrance in
the opening cue. Wildly rambling piano, clicking rhythms, and more snare
are another extension of
Apollo 13 in "The Quarry." After those
two early cues,
Ransom hibernates until the finale. A light
woodwind theme continues to twist notes in
Sneakers fashion in "A
Two Million Dollar Bounty," and the previously mentioned finale, "The
Payoff," takes a page or two of chaotic writing from
Aliens. The
Billy Corgan cues were minimized in the film for good reason, but they
still occupy 25 minutes on the latter half of the
Ransom album.
The grungy band performances in these cues have the same intelligence in
structure as their track titles and share absolutely no characteristics
with Horner's music. Obviously an attempt by the studio to mass-market
the
Ransom album, Corgan's contribution would be a disgrace to
any orchestral score product, and here it is best ignored if possible.
As for Horner's work,
Ransom represents what some critics could
deem "the ultimate self-rip-off," but given that he had only two weeks
to manipulate temp tracks into a new work, you have to cut him some
slack. As a listening experience, however, the
Ransom album
presents nothing really interesting in Horner's half and nothing worth
tolerating in Corgan's half. This is definitely an album for which no
ransom should be paid.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.15
(in 108 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.23
(in 203,345 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
