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Review of Samaritan (Jed Kurzel/Kevin Kiner)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... if your brain is wired to admire pitch-bending techniques meant to avoid clean, accessible tonalities, this score opting for mangled processing of all its components in a failed effort to be inventive.

Avoid it... if you hope that the reasonable depth of themes in the score can salvage its otherwise abrasive tone, for they offer very little emotional connection to the characters of the story.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Samaritan: (Jed Kurzel/Kevin Kiner) Audiences are willing to watch producer and actor Sylvester Stallone as an aging mercenary and aging boxer, so why not feature the 75-year-old as an aging superhero? He is a superhuman with incredible strength and healing powers in Samaritan, trying to live peacefully in a fictional, timeless city. When a neighbor boy finds himself in trouble, Samaritan intervenes, reintroducing his heroism to the city. A gangster finds the powerful hammer of Samaritan's evil twin brother, Nemesis, and forces an uncomfortable confrontation. Surprise identity twists are inevitable, but nothing can provide Samaritan with a sense of heart and purpose. There's only so much the film can accomplish with Stallone as the ass-kicking savior, but after the movie was sold to Amazon for streaming purposes in the wake of the pandemic, audiences found it intriguing enough to generate solid viewership. Director Julius Avery returned to his fellow Australian, rocker-turned-composer Jed Kurzel, to provide the score for Samaritan. Kurzel had provided music for both of the director's prior movies, and he intended to complete this project solo as well. With the movie's post-production schedule suddenly truncated in 2020, Kurzel brought veteran composer Kevin Kiner (and Kiner's sons, Sean and Dean) onto the project to assist with action cues. When the schedule of the movie's release was altered again to account for the pandemic, Kurzel and Kiner had significantly more time to develop a true collaborative impact on the music. Kiner found it challenging to match Kurzel's musical voice at first, studying the composer's prior works, and he eventually found himself adapting some of Kurzel's unusual ideas into music that could be performed by an orchestra. In the end. The resulting partnership on the score is yet another example of music that strives to reinvent the hybrid organic/synthetic blend for a soundtrack in an attempt to find a new angle to the sound. The techniques are familiar to countless other strategic siblings in the genre, though, eclectic, low-fidelity, synthetic sounds tangling with mangled, processed orchestra in ways that produce very few genuinely new impacts. The composers spend so much time trying to conjure ways to generate different sounds, in fact, that they completely lose the foundational point of the score: to create an emotional connection with the story and characters. At this critical task, they completely fail.

The most pervasive stylistic choice originally settled upon by Kurzel for the score was to apply significant doses of pitch-bending processing to avoid clean tonalities, a tactic meant to match the lead character's broken persona. After all, disillusioned heroes require music so manipulated that it devolves into sound effects, right? Of course not. The dark and over-processed atmosphere for Samaritan offers none of the heart this film needs, with no remote sense of warmth or redemption for the protagonists and absolutely no dramatic element for the character revelations and maturation. Instead, Kurzel and Kiner plunder the opportunity to overthink the morbid challenges, masculinity, and criminality of the story. Kurzel himself, who doesn't play the cello, recorded himself producing growling effects on the instrument, and from there came the inspiration for the endless and tiring tone of the rest. An orchestra of strings and brass rarely sounds genuine, their mix twisted so that they are not always recognizable. Keyboarding carries most of the softer passages, and celesta emerges as an odd instrumental color in the middle portions. On the upside, the composers do generate a recurring collection of themes that punctuate characters as one would expect in a superhero score, albeit in extremely muddy enunciation. There is some useless action pounding without the themes in some portions, especially "Warehouse Battle," but Kurzel and Kiner do tend to stay close to their theme set in most cues. Don't expect the ideas for Samaritan, Sam, Nemesis, Cyrus, and the film as a whole to reach out and grab your attention positively; some listeners may not even discern them at all, as their performances aren't typically obvious or accessible. The two core themes represent the concepts of hero and villain, though those attributions shift to varying characters as required by the story. The hero theme, largely for Samaritan, consist of slow, four-note chord shifts with rare, secondary phrases that meander without purpose. It's reminiscent of Hans Zimmer's simplistic identities in this arena, introduced at 0:32 into "Samaritan vs Nemesis" on low strings and brass in a long crescendo and returning at 0:36 into "Rescued." It's an interlude to the latter half softness of "Wall of Sam" on low strings, moves to gloomy action mode at 1:52 into "Wipe City Dark," announces itself with bravado at 0:20 into "Cyrus vs Nemesis" over distorted synths (repeating in similar fashion in the latter half of the cue), is hinted in the middle of "We Got This," and informs the closing of the score at 0:56 into "Good and Bad."

The villain's theme in Samaritan is its most obvious identity, if only because it inelegantly pounds itself into your memory. Alternately representing Cyrus and Nemesis, this five-note theme in two ascending phrases is often presented over wretchedly meandering pitch tones. It debuts at 1:50 into "Samaritan vs Nemesis" in muscular menace, joined by choir at 2:27, and stutters on distorted strings at 1:05 into "Heist" before closing that cue on what sounds like a prepared piano. The villain's theme is barely discernable in "Nemesis Nightmare" over pitch-meandering effects, chugs along under the suspense of "Hostage," and continues stewing to open "Samaritan Lives," sprinkling in some horn of doom blasts and later consolidating on brass with cheaply overblown synthetic choir. The idea opens "War Path" faintly, persists at 1:27 into "Bad Guy" on brass over terrible electronic distortion, builds to massive scope at 0:15 into "Wipe City Dark," and receives one last blast near the end of "We Got This." For the boy, Sam, the composers meagerly establish a faint idea on strings at 0:22 into "Cyrus" that also opens "Graphite Bombs" on distorted solo cello, shifting to brass at 0:51. It is manipulated into a different end at the start of "Rescued," but the score loses this idea thereafter. More engaging is a theme seemingly for the boy and Joe, Stallone's everyday character. This long, somewhat frantic string figure is introduced at 0:16 into "Beaten and Delivered" and 0:37 into "Back Scar," opening "Wall of Sam" on celesta and developing descending three-note phrases on top; the theme is fully developed in the middle of the cue in heartier symphonic shades that even hint of some Danny Elfman sadness in the performance. After the theme stews early in "Car Hit," its rhythm returns at 2:48 into "Nemesis Nightmare." A soft passage at 0:37 into "The Talk" reprises the sadness from "Wall of Sam" while the rhythm in suspense mode battles the villain theme in the latter half of "Hostage." This protagonist melody tries to fight off the villain's theme in the first minute of "Wipe City Dark" and becomes vaguely elegant on piano at the start of "Good and Bad." Kurzel and Kiner rarely provide truly satisfying renditions of their themes, and some ideas, like the ascending phrases that climb nicely during "Walking Home" in light coolness on keyboards over thumping percussion, never return in discernable form at all. The personality of this score's abrasive sound was the composers' concentration, the extensive pitch manipulation a centerpiece. While it achieves its unpleasant demeanor well, it doesn't do so in any really inventive fashion. More importantly, it mostly misses any semblance of emotional character development. There's absolutely nothing admirable or likable about this marginally effective and disheartening fantasy music.  *

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 56:07

• 1. Samaritan vs Nemesis* (2:56) • 2. Walking Home (2:03) • 3. Cyrus Arrives (1:28) • 4. Graphite Bombs* (1:15) • 5. Sam Rescued (1:05) • 6. Beaten and Delivered* (4:26) • 7. Back Scar* (1:09) • 8. Heist (3:14) • 9. Wall of Sam (2:56) • 10. Car Hit (1:51) • 11. Nemesis Nightmare (3:44)

• 12. The Talk (1:51) • 13. Hostage (3:01) • 14. Samaritan Lives** (4:38) • 15. War Path (1:37) • 16. Bad Guy** (3:57) • 17. Warehouse Battle** (3:34) • 18. Wipe City Dark** (2:26) • 19. Cyrus vs Nemesis** (4:16) • 20. We Got This** (2:04) • 21. Good and Bad* (2:34)

NOTES & QUOTES:

There exists no official packaging for this album.

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