Buy it... if you enjoy all forms of Jerry Goldsmith's action music, even if it is highly derivative of his other works.

Avoid it... if you don't need to hear Goldsmith on auto-pilot in a recording that is flat in ambience and missing some of the better material from the film.

Goldsmith

Executive Decision: (Jerry Goldsmith) After spending much of the early 1990's trudging though the less popular fields of children's films and light comedies, Jerry Goldsmith returned with force to the modern action genre in 1995 and 1996. The results of this return to arms were very mixed, varying from highly memorable to merely mediocre. One of the more mediocre ventures was Executive Decision, one of numerous projects for which Goldsmith's usual standard of action writing managed to save the film from total obscurity. At the time, Executive Decision was a largely advertised summer release that --along with Chain Reaction-- failed to add any little new substance to Goldsmith's career. The film touted its portrayal of a stealth aircraft in action, assisting a team of commandos board a hijacked plane full of... you guessed it: crazed Arabs. In this case, there's not only a load of people to save on the plane, but there's also a wicked bomb in its cargo hold that presents a significant danger once the plane crosses over America (you gotta love airport screening, no?). The story is familiar, surely, and Goldsmith would do much better with the similar subject matter in Air Force One, but Executive Decision did have the kind of cast that makes it one of the more enjoyable late-night finds on television. While Kurt Russell and Halle Berry save the day, the always amusing Navy Seal-inspired Steven Seagal makes a rare exit with a glorious death relatively early in the film (an intriguing plus). For Goldsmith, this is the kind of good-guy/bad-guy action that the composer likely heard in his own sleep, with a very typical orchestral and synthesized ensemble ready to pump out familiar Goldsmith-isms at every turn. Luckily, the feeling of re-used material was restricted to this film rather than overflowing into Air Force One, leaving Executive Decision as a faint shadow of the other score. Goldsmith would not do his best work for director Stuart Baird, with whom Goldsmith would also collaborate on U.S. Marshals and Star Trek: Nemesis.

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If there is one consistent aspect to Goldsmith's work for Baird's films, it's the lack of great steps in creativity. Almost in opposite fashion to his work on Joe Dante's more quirky films, the straight-laced action of Baird's projects, including Executive Decision, seems to leave Goldsmith without much inspiration. The themes and orchestration in Executive Decision are familiar, with the ensemble's performances often dull and lacking vibrance. There is little enthusiasm to be heard out of these performers, with Goldsmith's brass fanfares here missing the bounce and dynamic energy that they exhibit in his other scores. The fanfare itself is structurally very similar to that of First Knight, and trumpets seem content to perform a very faint alternating motif that once again raises memories of Patton. For the many action sequences, Goldsmith's rhythmic material lets rip with the light snare and tingling electronics, but the flat ambience and average-at-best primary theme severely restrict the score's ability to interest you beyond the vast collection of other Goldsmith works. Even the synthetic motif for the Arab terrorists is conceived in a half-assed manner, very underdeveloped and stereotypical in its use of Middle-Eastern progressions. For collectors of all of Goldsmith's action material, the opening three and closing three cues on the Varèse Sarabande album will provide ten to fifteen minutes of reasonable, but underdeveloped material with familiar origins. On album, the score suffers more than some other Goldsmith projects because the cues presented in the film were often very short in length. Although Goldsmith recorded over 80 minutes of music for the film, the commercial album woefully presents less than 30 of those minutes (and despite the re-use payment reasons that justify this length, Goldsmith fans continue to use Executive Decision as a complaint point), with only the lengthier ones chosen for inclusion. Unfortunately, some of the more interesting music from the film existed in those short less-than-a-minute cues that were not provided. These omissions, along with a composer on auto-pilot and a recording that is flat in ambience, make Executive Decision an album to avoid unless you are a fanatic collector. **

Bias Check:

For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.22 (in 111 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.36 (in 120,040 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.