MOVIE MUSIC UK

THROWBACK THIRTY

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

No Escape is a brutal, violent, but unexpectedly enjoyable action-thriller film directed by Martin Campbell, based on the 1987 novel The Penal Colony by Richard Herley. The film is set in a dystopian future – the hellscape of 2022! – where a former US marine named Robbins, played by Ray Liotta, is wrongfully convicted of murder and sent to a remote island prison called Absolom as punishment. This island is a lawless penal colony where the inmates are left to fend for themselves without guards or rules. Robbins must navigate this harsh and violent environment while trying to survive and escape from the island; he encounters different factions of inmates who have formed their own societies, some more hostile than others, and as Robbins learns the brutal ways of Absolom, he becomes determined to find a way off the island and regain his freedom. The film is a testosterone-fest that has an excellent supporting cast including Lance Henriksen, Stuart Wilson, Kevin Dillon, Kevin J. O’Connor, Michael Lerner, and Ernie Hudson.

Despite being one of a slew of ‘innocent man escapes from prison’ movies that came out around that period, and despite the fact that it seems to have been thrown together at the last minute, with director Campbell only agreeing to make it because he wanted to buy a house, it was a surprise box office hit when it was released in the spring of 1994. The score for No Escape was by New Zealand composer Graeme Revell, who by this point in career was firmly in the middle of his ‘Hollywood action movie’ phase; immediately prior to No Escape he had scored things like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Body of Evidence, Boxing Helena, Hard Target, and Ghost in the Machine. No Escape would be his only collaboration with director Campbell, but it’s a memorable one, because for me this is one of his best efforts in the genre.

I always found that Graeme Revell was a difficult composer to pin down. He had a tendency to be a bit abstract and experimental in his work, something that was clearly a holdover from his time as the leader of the industrial/electronic group SPK in the 1980s, and this often led to me finding his scores somewhat anonymous and perhaps a bit impenetrable. However, No Escape is one of his most approachable efforts, an enjoyable and engaging thriller score that uses numerous traditional 1990s orchestral textures, but also works in some unusual electronics and even what appear to be sampled animal noises, to add a different dimension to the score. These sampled industrial and animal noises appear to have been the work of Brian Williams, better known these days as Lustmord, but who in the 1990s was Revell’s assistant on several of his best known projects.

The score is bookended by two surprisingly sweeping themes, one in “No Escape: Main Titles,” and one at the end of “The Trap Is Set and Freedom”. In the former, after a few moments of dark, guttural sound design and sampled industrial vocals, the orchestra opens up into an unexpectedly lush string melody, accompanying the opening vistas of Absolom island, which looks like an tropical paradise, but whose verdant beauty masks danger within. The cue ends with a piece of militaristic fife-and-drum pastiche, which is fun and authentic.

Later cues like “The Insiders’ Camp,” “Wet Dreams,” the opening part of “Robbins Returns to the Outsiders’ Camp,” and “Redemption and New Hope” briefly revisit the lush string sounds of the main title, before the whole thing ends with a lovely flourish in the closing moments of the aforementioned “The Trap Is Set and Freedom”.

The rest of the score moves freely between moments of large-scale action and low-key orchestral suspense and drama, with more of the unusual industrial sampled noises thrown in for good measure. The action music is generally high quality, and appears to take a great deal of inspiration from the music that composers like Jerry Goldsmith and Basil Poledouris were composing at the time; there are what appears to be temp-track influences from scores like Total Recall, The Hunt for Red October, and Robocop, especially in the way that Revell combines his electronic percussion into the orchestra. Cues like “Helicopter to Absolom,” “Battle With Marek,” the latter half of “Casey Tortured,” “Robbins Kills Casey,” and the aggressively insistent “Marek’s Death” are notable in this regard. “Battle With Marek” is for me the pick of the bunch, especially when Revell introduces a bank of wild, slashing strings into the mix.

Brian Williams’s major contribution appears to be the textures related to ‘The Outsiders,’ a group of prisoners on the islands who have given themselves over to their basest animalistic tendencies, and whose only rule is ‘the law of the jungle’. Cues like “Robbins Captured By the Outsiders” are fascinating exercises in sonic manipulation, for which Revell and Williams appear to have sampled elephant trumpets and howling chimpanzee noises and turned them into a musical representation of the Outsider culture. Later cues such as “The Father,” “Outsiders Attack,” and the first half of “Casey Tortured” explore similar sounds and ideas, often in conjunction with tribal percussion patterns, chanted vocals, and huffing, breathy woodwinds. It’s unusual, but very effective.

Other cues of note include “I Love Those Boots,” which is an unexpectedly upbeat piece of country pastiche for guitar and honky-tonk piano, featuring a performance by guitarist Philip Tallman. At the other end of the scale, “The Funeral Pyre” has an appropriate sense of deep emotional anguish to it which is quite palpable, while “The Traitor Unmasked” has a sense of relief coupled with tension and revelation that allows the discovery that one of Robbins’s supposed allies has actually been working against him to have a real dramatic impact.

Despite all this general positivity, the one thing that holds No Escape back is the lack of a truly unifying theme to bring the whole story together. To be frank, Revell was never a really great theme writer on his best days, so perhaps this was always going to be a stretch, but the fact that there is no clearly identifiable identity for Robbins, or for Marek, is nevertheless disappointing, and is the main factor that keeps the score a step behind its contemporaries.

Still, No Escape remains an enjoyable and engaging work, one of Revell’s best in the genre. The bookending cues have a satisfying 1990s orchestral sweep, the action music is engaging, and the sampled animal sounds used to convey the primal nature of one of the prison island factions – while not pleasant to listen to – at least give this score a unique touch. While other later scores by Graeme Revell have more acclaim, or were written for films with a more lasting legacy, No Escape is a decent B-movie action-adventure score that should not be overlooked.

Buy the No Escape soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• No Escape: Main Titles (1:58)
• Helicopter to Absolom (2:01)
• Robbins Captured By the Outsiders (1:53)
• Ralph: Director of Aquatic Activities (0:49)
• The Father (1:55)
• The Insiders’ Camp (1:34)
• Wet Dreams (2:05)
• I Love Those Boots (1:48)
• Banishment (1:32)
• On the Ramparts / Outsiders Attack (3:24)
• Battle With Marek (1:26)
• The Funeral Pyre (1:32)
• Robbins Returns to the Outsiders’ Camp (1:31)
• Casey Tortured (3:34)
• Robbins Kills Casey (1:19)
• Redemption and New Hope (2:16)
• Marek’s Death (1:39)
• The Traitor Unmasked (1:38)
• The Trap Is Set and Freedom (3:46)

Varese Sarabande VSD-5483 (1994)

Running Time: 37 minutes 40 seconds

Music composed by Graeme Revell. Conducted by Tim Simonec. Orchestrations by Tim Simonec. Recorded and mixed by Keith Grant. Edited by Dick Bernstein. Album produced by Graeme Revell.