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| Debney |
Sudden Death: (John Debney) No less than a dozen
films could trace their inspiration back to the original
Die
Hard, including its sequels. It seems that every venue has been
taken over by terrorists, from battleships to trains, and in 1995, the
time came for a professional sports team stadium to be taken hostage. In
this case, it's the home of the Pittsburgh Penguins and the setting is
game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals. The John McLane-style hero is
Jean-Claude Van Damme, accepting yet another demeaning role that allows
him to kick a fellow human being in the head, although
Sudden
Death is so bad that he actually gets to suit up and play on the ice
at one point, too. Director Peter Hyams has a knack for exciting action
and chase sequences, and
Sudden Death has its fair share of
those, but the screenplay's dialogue and totally illogical leaps, along
with a supporting cast that doesn't really seem to care about any of the
proceedings, relegated the project to the depths of despair so
treacherous that you don't even see the film on late night cable re-runs
very often anymore. Nothing about the film suggests nuance, and unless
you're a fan of Van Damme himself,
Sudden Death is a painfully
dumb waste of a few hours. With almost everyone involved with the
picture seemingly on autopilot, it's no surprise that composer John
Debney provides a score that pushes all the buttons without really
accomplishing anything spectacular itself. Debney was just beginning to
make a significant impact on the film scoring world in 1995, with his
score for
Cutthroat Island raising a flurry of deserved interest.
It was with much excitement that the succeeding
Sudden Death gave
listeners another opportunity to hear the composer's action skills.
Unfortunately, there is about as much inspiration in Debney's writing
here as there is in Van Damme's facial expressions. The composer has
completed many projects like this in the following years, with his
diligent workmanship attitude providing temp-happy sounds to nearly any
kind of project.
Perhaps
Sudden Death didn't deserve anything
more than this kind of basic accompaniment. Debney certainly has offered
far more unique ideas. The one thing this score has going for it is that
Debney's avoids simply rehashing the temp tracks and manages to write a
score that sounds unique, despite all of its individual elements
pointing to tired structures from other action scores. You often hear
Debney collectors refer to
Sudden Death as an exhibition of the
composer in the same autopilot mode as Jerry Goldsmith was in for
similarly poor projects at the same time. For
Sudden Death,
Debney's themes are stale and limp, stated without resolve in a handful
of the action cues. No attempt to really adapt this theme into the
suspense or dramatic underscore cues is made, leaving it hanging in
fragments during most of the action. The piano's low ranges represent
the personality of the score, striking the ominous tones at the outset
of the film and providing thunderous contributions to the action
rhythms. A variety of light percussion and high range metallic,
synthetic sounds present the predictable rhythmic base for "Finding the
Bombs" and a few other cues involving explosives. The mass of the score
is driven by stock action music, often imitating Goldsmith and Michael
Kamen. For the larger chase sequences involving the stadium as a whole,
Debney cranks up the rhythms with a consistent timpani and low-range
synthetic pulsation, but he rarely lets loose with a satisfying,
harmonic statement of motif. Simple strikes, orchestra hits, standard
horror slashes, and a rather poor imagination with the brass cause most
of the action material to meld into the background. The only breaks in
the nonstop bombast are the occasional crescendos of string majesty,
heard briefly in "Seeing Tyler" and "Rooftop Battle," mirroring the
sound of Basil Poledouris' work for similar formula films. The project
could really have used more of this dramatic pull, but Debney dutifully
earned his paycheck by accompanying the tired action scenes with
appropriately generic action music. Overall,
Sudden Death is
basically competent, but stale at every turn.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For John Debney reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.27
(in 52 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3
(in 44,822 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
