Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,929
Written 1/12/12
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Buy it... if Christophe Beck's snazzy main theme caught your
attention in the film and you would be content with five or six engaging
performances of that slightly retro, funky identity on album.
Avoid it... if you place high hopes in the mass of the underscore
surrounding the main theme, most of which sounds familiar to Beck's
previous applications of contemporary suspense and enthusiastic comedy
in an orchestral setting.
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| Beck |
Tower Heist: (Christophe Beck) During its several
years in the making, Tower Heist evolved from being an all-black
comedy led by Eddie Murphy and Chris tucker to an anti-Wall Street heist
parody starring a variety of veteran comedy actors. Murphy eventually
returned to the production (though continued to be a pain in its rear
through the end of shooting) and joined Ben Stiller and Matthew
Broderick in depicting the efforts of everyday folks turned criminals in
an effort to reclaim money from Alan Alda's New York businessman's Ponzi
scheme. Carrying over from the early days of the script in the
mid-2000's was involvement by Donald Trump, who allowed the use of his
properties to double as the locations (and partial inspiration) for the
2011 film. Ridiculous and implausible twists of plot and character
motivations abound in Tower Heist, though critics praised several
of the acting performances, including the welcome return of Murphy to
1980's form. While originality in the story was not a paramount concern
(countless re-writes plagued the movie for years but did not make
anything about it transcendent), the choice of Universal to release the
movie for $60 as a pay-per-view cable option in select American markets
just three weeks after it debuted in theatres caused a large alliance of
theatre chains to threaten to boycott showing the picture, at which
point Universal relented and Tower Heist became fairly successful
in its box office run. Among the concerns of director Brett Ratner was
avoiding too many similarities to the franchise of Ocean's Eleven
in the script (which itself prompted some specific revisions), and that
point was also raised when approaching the music for Tower Heist.
While Ratner had typically worked with major names in the film music
industry throughout his career, he was pointed to emerging comedy
composer Christophe Beck as a good possible match for this assignment.
Beck, although occasionally testing his chops in the drama and fantasy
genres, was best known in the 2000's for supplementing song-placement
soundtracks in major comedy movies with functionally hip and sometimes
fully orchestral underscores, lending his services notably to the
franchises for The Hangover and The Pink Panther. His work
concurrent to Tower Heist included writing the score for the
reemergence of The Muppets, and the more you listen to this
music, the more you realize that Beck can write it on auto-pilot.
There are countless composers toiling in Hollywood with
careers dominated by silly comedies, though Beck has managed to provide
consistently competent music that rivals the best of peers Rolfe Kent
and Christopher Lennertz. Ratner's skepticism about Beck's abilities was
squashed when the composer provided a main theme for
Tower Heist
based solely upon the director's basic dictated parameters. There was an
effort to define the movie with a dominant, hip title theme saturated
with New York pizzazz while avoiding the expected David Holmes sound for
the
Ocean's Eleven franchise (and those that came before it), and
Beck, with the assistance of co-composer Jake Monaco, created exactly
that kind of identity. A bit surprising in the main theme for
Tower
Heist, however, is the continued influence of the 1970's crime caper
sound in Beck's approach despite Ratner's desire to avoid that style.
Indeed, a groovy bass (which slurs and pulsates with style) and
enthusiastic brass section infuse appropriate coolness into the score,
though the application of a vibraphone, guitar, and a few other elements
does recall the 70's era. As instructed, Beck inserts this theme
prominently into several cues, its on screen time glorified by "We Go on
Snoopy" and "Gold Rush" and the album containing five minutes in two
full arrangements of just this idea. The theme is well integrated into
the bulk of the score, which remains more traditionally orchestral in
its demeanor. The ensemble's style is very similar to that heard in the
suspense and action cues of Beck's scores for
The Pink Panther
movies, but with a certain dose of American funk replacing the prior
works' international flavor. Rarely is the action music in
Tower
Heist very substantial, though there is a somewhat humorous
piano-thumping emulation of John Rambo's sneaking motif from the
First Blood franchise in "Courthouse Con." The weightiest
symphonic passage is arguably the first half of "Shawstafari," which
finally melds beefy orchestral might with the vintage style. In this and
similar cues (like "Shaft Fail"), the action sequences are really too
short in duration for their snare-ripping attitude to maintain your
interest on album. The score-only product is only 40 minutes in length,
an appropriate running time for a work that pushes all the right buttons
for this kind of film without presenting anything radically new. You'll
have to appreciate the snazzy title theme's five or six major
presentations for that album to really mean anything to you, however,
because outside of that modernized but somewhat mundane identity of
funk, Beck could very well have been on auto-pilot for the rest.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For Christophe Beck reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.06
(in 16 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.06
(in 4,996 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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