Archive
THE EXPENDABLES 2 – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Had it been made in 1989, The Expendables 2 would without a doubt have been the biggest box office draw of the year. At the height of the action hero era, any film with a cast that included Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis alongside Jean Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren and Chuck Norris… well, the testosterone quotient alone might have been enough to make any cinema screen explode with sheer masculinity. Add in modern action stars Jason Statham, Liam Hemsworth and Jet Li, a competent director in Simon Wells, and a concise and self-aware screenplay, and you have a film that is both a nostalgic throwback to that macho era, and an enjoyable contemporary popcorn adventure that pulls no punches when it comes to blood, bullets, fists, and slow-motion walks towards the camera. Stallone stars as the leader of a band of good-guy mercenaries for hire, who are sent by the CIA into the mountains of Albania to retrieve the contents of a safe lost in a plane crash. It looks like a walk in the park, until one of their number is killed by the suavely ruthless (and unambiguously named) arms dealer Jean Vilain – played with icy coolness by Van Damme – who is also after the contents of the safe, and all hell breaks loose as the Expendables look for revenge. Read more…
A SYMPHONY OF HOPE: THE HAITI PROJECT – Christopher Lennertz et al.
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
On January 12, 2010, the city of Port-au-Prince in Haiti was effectively flattened when it was struck by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Within a matter of seconds over 50,000 people had been killed, and over a million people left homeless. Diseases such as cholera blighted the survivors and thwarted relief efforts, and since then the humanitarian crisis in the country has reached staggering proportions, with over 250,000 residences destroyed and basic services and infrastructure left in ruins. Reacting to the global call for help, film composer Christopher Lennertz was inspired to act. Calling upon his fellow composers and other members of the Los Angeles film music community of musicians and engineers, Lennertz teamed up with the charity Hands Together to create A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project, a musical fundraising project intended to help the people of Haiti. Read more…
A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project
Last Saturday, March 26th, I had the honor attending the recording sessions for “A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project” at the Eastwood Scoring Stage at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, CA. The brainchild of composer Christopher Lennertz, the Symphony is musical fundraising project designed to help the people of Haiti in their desperate time of need.
A year after the terrible earthquake which destroyed the lives of thousands of Haitians, it was clear to Lennertz that the need for assistance was greater than ever. In response Lennertz came up with the idea of the ”Symphony of Hope”, and invited 25 leading film composers to collaborate with him on a project to benefit the Haiti Earthquake Relief fund. Read more…
LAW ABIDING CITIZEN – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Taking its cue from 70s revenge movies like Charles Bronson’s Death Wish series, Law Abiding Citizen is the story of Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) an everyday joe whose life is turned upside down when his family is murdered in a home invasion. However, when district attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) plea bargains a deal to set the killers free, Clyde decides to take matters into his own hands and dispense his own kind of justice. The film is directed by F. Gary Gray, and features a new score from the absurdly busy Brian Tyler, his sixth score of 2009 following features like Dragonball Evolution, Fast & Furious and The Final Destination. Read more…
THE FINAL DESTINATION – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As if they hadn’t squeezed enough life out of this franchise yet, The Final Destination – the fourth film in the horror movie franchise – again follows the fortunes of a set of teenagers who cheat death, but then find that Death doesn’t like being cheated, and sets out to claim them anyway. The film is directed by David R. Ellis and stars Bobby Campo as college student Nick O’Bannon who, while attending a NASCAR race, has a premonition that a car wreck will cause a stand to collapse, killing himself and his friends; he convinces everyone to leave before the disaster occurs, but in the weeks following the event, his friends all die one by one in freak accidents.
The late, great Shirley Walker set the musical tone for the first three Final Destination films prior to her untimely death in 2006, and her mantle has now been picked up by the resourceful Brian Tyler Read more…
DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A big-budget big screen version of the well-loved Japanese anime TV series, Dragonball Evolution stars Justin Chatwin as Son Goku, a young warrior sets out on a quest to collect a set of seven magical orbs that will grant their wielder unlimited power However, not only does young Goku face a race against time to find the orbs, he also faces a dangerous adversary in the shape of the evil and vengeful King Piccolo (James Marsters), who wants the orbs for his own nefarious purposes.
The film is directed by James Wong, co-stars Chow Yun Fat, Emmy Rossum and Jamie Chung, and has a lively and energetic original score by the ever-busy Brian Tyler. Read more…
FAST & FURIOUS – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The fourth film in the high octane ‘Fast and the Furious’ series, and the second one scored by Brian Tyler, Fast & Furious re-unites Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster, the four stars of the original 2001 hit. In this new film Brian O’Conner (Walker) is again working undercover for the FBI, and approaches street racer Dominic Toretto (Diesel) for help in bringing down a vicious heroin importer. Having scored the third F&F film, Tokyo Drift, for his friend and regular collaborator Justin Lin, Brian Tyler returns to lend his musical voice to the fourth film too.
Part of Tyler’s score are scored like a modern day Western, with electric and acoustic guitars pitting themselves against driving electronic rhythms, techno beats and roaring percussion Read more…
EAGLE EYE – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As good a composer as Brian Tyler is – and, make no mistake about it, he is a great composer – it’s been quite a while since he knocked my socks off. His monumental first ‘big’ scores Darkness Falls and Children of Dune in 2003 were the high water mark of his early career; since then, scores like Godsend, Constantine, Partition and Alien vs. Predator Requiem contained a number of memorable moments, but never quite attained the heights those initial impressive works attained. With Eagle Eye, Tyler has changed that: for the first time in half a decade, Tyler’s music reaches those lofty perches and, most importantly, sustains them over the course of a long album. Read more…
BANGKOK DANGEROUS – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A big-budget remake of the 1999 Thai film of the same name, Bangkok Dangerous stars Nicolas Cage as a hit man named Joe who finds himself in a series of increasingly dangerous situations when he is hired to carry out four assassinations by a shadowy Thai underworld gang. In remaking their own film, directors Danny Pang and Oxide Pang hired Brian Tyler to write the score; the resulting work is rooted in the same stylistics that have adorned Tyler’s scores for similar action thrillers – The Fast and the Furious – Tokyo Drift, War, Eagle Eye, and the like – albeit with a slight Oriental inflection in some of the instrumentation to reflect the geographic setting. Read more…
RAMBO – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Clark Douglas
John Rambo, that complex-political-symbol-turned-pulp-hero played by Sylvester Stallone, is finally back. After a long absence in which nobody really seemed to miss Rambo very much, Stallone has brought the character back to life in an attempt to quench the undying mild curiousity of his fans. His new effort is winning reviews similar to those that greeted the second and third Rambo films, and people generally seem a lot more cynical about seeing 60-year-old Rambo do battle in the jungle than they did about seeing 60-year-old Rocky do battle in a boxing ring. Read more…
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s interesting how the careers of Brian Tyler and the late Jerry Goldsmith have dovetailed: Tyler replaced Goldsmith on Timeline in 2003, and is scoring the fourth Rambo movie in a series which Goldsmith made his own. On Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, Tyler is not only following in the footsteps of Goldsmith, but also James Horner, Elliot Goldenthal and Alan Silvestri, each of whom left an indelible musical mark on their respective entries into the franchises. What’s most impressive about this score is how Tyler has managed to pay homage to all the composers who preceded him by incorporating some of their compositional stylistics into his own music, while still retaining a great deal of his own voice throughout the score. Read more…
FINISHING THE GAME – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Clark Douglas
As soon as the first cue of “Finishing the Game” takes off with late 70′s funk rhythms, one wonders whether Brian Tyler has decided to open his score album with a cool source cue. Then there’s another one. And another one. And another one. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Brian Tyler… the new David Holmes. Using only equipment available to musicians of the 1970′s, Brian has crafted a small ensemble score (or is he playing everything himself?) that ranks as one of the more entertaining scores of his career (if one of the least substantial). Read more…
WAR – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Clark Douglas
I didn’t see the Jason Statham/Jet Li action flick “War”, so I can’t really tell you whether or not it was any good. I saw plenty of trailers for it, and they did their best to make it look as generic and typical as possible. The score by Brian Tyler seems to be attempting to do the exact same thing. It sounds like every other gritty action score you’ve ever heard, and while I’m sure that might delight the crowd of people who fell in love with the ultra-derivative Steve Jablonsky score for “Transformers”, it doesn’t particularly please me.
You see, Tyler is a talented composer who I’ve admired for quite some time. His scores for “Darkness Falls”, “Timeline”, “Partition”, “Children of Dune”, and others are really excellent albums, and Tyler is a stickler for trying to make his music as organic and authentic as possible Read more…
BUG – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Clark Douglas
On a purely technical level, William Friedkin’s “Bug” is one of the simplest films you will see this year, if you see it at all. It has only seven speaking roles and takes place almost entirely on one fairly ordinary set. It is being released in the middle of a summer movie season full of action-packed blockbusters, and has no special effects or star power to its advantage (unless you count Ashley Judd as star power). It is being billed as a terrifying horror film, and promises the sort of torturous jolts provided to audiences by the “Saw” films, but there is really very little of that, either. “Bug” is merely an incredibly effective observation of sad, lonely people taking a desperate journey into madness. Read more…
THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I’ve never actually seen any of the films, so it’s quite possible I could be missing something, but I’ve never fully understood how The Fast and the Furious became a franchise. The films themselves seem to be little more than elongated car chases filled with various kinds of sexy imagery – shiny chrome bodywork on the autos, scantily clad women draped over them – and star increasingly anonymous hunky male leads caught up in some kind of flaccid crime plot which involves having to drive at ludicrous speeds. Having already gone through Paul Walker, Vin Diesel and Tyrese Gibson, the third instalment stars Lucas Black (all grown up after his performance as a kid in the Oscar-winning Sling Blade), as Sean Boswell, a teenage troublemaker sent to live with his strict military father in Japan, and who gets caught up in the underground world of ‘drift racing’ round the streets of Tokyo. Read more…
