Archive
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…
CONSTANTINE – Brian Tyler and Klaus Badelt
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The latest in a long line of comic book adaptations to hit the silver screen, director Francis Lawrence’s film Constantine is based on the classic Hellblazer story by Jamie Delano and Garth Ellis, transposed from Liverpool to contemporary Los Angeles. Keanu Reeves stars as John Constantine, a man cursed with the awareness that a war between angels and demons is taking place on Earth. Having been driven insane by his visions, he committed suicide as a youth, but was sent back by the angel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) and charged with destroying as many demons as possible, in order to atone for his sins and be able to enter Heaven again when he finally dies for the second time. However, as the story begins, Constantine finds himself facing his biggest challenge yet: with the help of a similarly gifted Los Angeles cop (Rachel Weisz), Constantine must thwart the plans of Satan’s son, who is planning to be re-born on Earth himself. Read more…
DARKNESS FALLS – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Traditionally, horror movies have given enthusiastic young composers an opportunity to “show what they are made of” and demonstrate their orchestral know-how to the world at large. Unconstrained by the demands of subtlety and studio interference, and working in a genre where music is perhaps more important than in any other, these ambitious men and women have regularly begun their careers writing for stalk and slash, knife-wielding stories, honing their craft, and demonstrating their talents. Over the years, the likes of James Horner, Christopher Young and (more recently) Marco Beltrami have embarked on their career ladder by scoring serial killer movies and monster flicks – and now Brian Tyler can be added to this list. It’s been quite a while since we had a balls-to-the-wall horror score on our hands. Darkness Falls is one of them. Read more…
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