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With the small ensemble for The Weather Man established by just the handful of collaborators in Zimmer's studio, the biggest decision about the contemporary sound for the film came when the composer decided to approach the topic from a humorously off-kilter perspective. Snowy Chicago isn't exactly the first place you'd expect to hear lazy Caribbean reggae tones, but that's where Zimmer went for the picture, building off of the sound of the electric piano to generate a smooth and carefree attitude. The approach makes for unique music in the composer's career, but it does nothing to really address the heart of the narrative. For some listeners, the music's lack of dramatic sincerity may have contributed to the film's inability to connect. A bit of this nagging issue of inauthenticity may have been exacerbated by a meandering narrative tone at times as well. Zimmer wrote the score's main theme that follows the lead character from start to end, and it repeats significantly through all the Zimmer-led cues. These are the reggae portions, to a large degree, though the meandering theme of lazy note pairs also diminishes down to more somber exploration, as in "Refreshing" and "Frustrations." Most listeners will appreciate its incarnations with faux-whistling in "I Have a Plan" and "The Weather Man," however. The cues contributed to by other composer are where the score really branches off into other ideas, starting with a family motif for synthetic woodwind in "Shelly's Lesson," "Frustrations," "Family Winterfest," and "Shelly Goes New York Style." These moments by Baerwald are friendly musical wallpaper, light jazz that doesn't go anywhere. Explosive percussive sequences like "Tartar Sauce" and the middle of "Good Morning Mirror" by Clay Duncan, along with the slappy group effort for "Clowns," are atrocious distractions. The Tillman portions in "Frustrations," "Family Winterfest," "Something About Bob," and "Accuracy Equals Focusing" try unsuccessfully to establish much-needed dramatic resonance, but some weight is finally applied alongside piano in "Funeral." Zimmer's own secondary theme for the character's resilience in "19th Century Noble Man" and "Who Knows?" is a pure 1970's representation of quietly confident defiance. All of these ideas struggle to form a cohesive narrative flow, the stream-of-consciousness process of assigning certain parts of the story to Zimmer's contributors robbing the whole of a much-needed anchor that the main theme's reggae personality alone doesn't really provide. The score, only released legitimately on a somewhat limited 2022 album, sounds like it was fun to record, and it may basically suffice for the attitude of the picture, but it still leaves you searching for its soul at the end.   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

• Score as Written for the Film:  ***
• Score as Heard on Album:  **
• Overall:  **

Bias Check:

For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.84 (in 124 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.95 (in 298,640 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

Total Time: 56:46