Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,628
Written 9/16/16
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Buy it... if your admiration of John Powell's music for the concept
can tolerate a disappointingly routine entry that fails to musically
enhance the drama or narrative of the plotline beyond its simple,
rhythmic adrenaline rush.
Avoid it... if you expect more than just a few minutes of the score
material to compete in your memory with the impressive new Moby
rendition of the "Extreme Ways" song for the end credits.
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| Powell |
Jason Bourne: (John Powell/David Buckley) After
2007's The Bourne Ultimatum, director Paul Greengrass and main
actor Matt Damon excused themselves from the franchise while it lurched
forward with the forgettable 2012 spin-off, The Bourne Legacy.
The original crew eventually reunited for a fourth proper Bourne-related
film in 2016, however, and Jason Bourne resurrected the
franchise's box office prowess despite its intensely violent killing
sequences. No longer as inspired directly from a Robert Ludlum novel,
the titular former CIA operative spends this fourth film finally
learning the remaining parameters of his past, including his familial
connections to the agency and the true intentions of its leadership.
After the often gruesome deaths of the majority of the story's
characters, Bourne has answers but no easy solutions, setting up the
potential for additional direct sequels, crew permitting. The music for
this franchise has never been fantastic outside of context, though John
Powell's late replacement score for The Bourne Identity is often
credited with unintentionally starting the cello action ostinato craze
that followed in the subsequent decade of chase scenes on the big
screen. Powell's music for the franchise improved in dramatic scope with
his sequels, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne
Ultimatum, before James Newton Howard's stand-in work for The
Bourne Legacy disappointed with its rather faceless imitation of
Powell's base sound and no new avenues of exploration. For Jason
Bourne, Powell returns, though primary compositional credit is
shared with collaborator and synthetics expert David Buckley. There has
been much speculation about why Buckley's greater role existed in this
score, though there was likely a combination of many factors at work.
Powell had shown a personal distaste for mindless action films in the
late 2000's, thus explaining his concentration on the children's genre.
He was also dealing with the death of his wife at the time of production
for Jason Bourne, and while this return to a familiar soundscape
was a welcome distraction, it could not compete with the issues
pertaining to Powell's grief. There's also the artistic argument to
made, one that suggests that the ever-increasing role of technology in
these films requires a better developed electronic presence in the
soundscape, and Buckley certainly steps up that element in Jason
Bourne.
Unfortunately, the resulting score for
Jason
Bourne is almost all process and almost no heart, the familiar
elements of the franchise's past still there but the gripping emotional
moments of Powell's better cues for the concept sadly absent. The
trademark ostinato formations return, but not with the intense staccato
force as before, a circumstance perhaps due to the increased amount of
electronic layers covering those strings. You hear the ostinatos at
their best in "Motorcycle Chase" and "Strip Chase," though these cues
are not highlights in the franchise. The rather anonymous applications
of the constant rhythmic formations causes this score to suffice but not
excel, emulating Howard's stance for the prior film in the series. The
primary bassoon theme for Bourne himself is expressed early in "I
Remember Everything" before additional reprises at the outsets of "Strip
Chase" and "Let Me Think About It." Sadly, for a film with as much
illumination about Bourne's past, there's very little satisfaction in
how this idea is developed or resolved (if such a thing is ever
possible). There is very little narrative flow to this score, in part
because of the plot's constant movement without concrete respite. The
softer moments of the work, which in the prior entries were moments
during which the listener could catch his breath, simply become dull
bores, the lack of gravity in any of these cues a tremendous
disappointment. Even the percussive slapping sounds stale, conflicting
at times with the electronic accents. The entirety of the score is
comforting in a minimal sense because of its familiarity, but it's
annoying in its lack of any attempt to evolve. One area of potential was
the presence of Moby's "Extreme Ways" song, the stalwart of the
franchise's end credits. The song has experienced a welcome update for
Jason Bourne, including some stylish female background vocals
(mixed, unfortunately too far back to have their maximum effect,
though), but outside of its really nice transition straight out of the
crescendo of string pulses that conclude "Let Me Think About It," there
continues to be no greater integration between the score and song
identities that have come to define this concept. In the end, listeners
will be pleased by the revision to the Moby song and, perhaps, find
inspiration in some pairing of "Motorcycle Chase" and "Let Me Think
About It" that could lead into the song as a suite of memorable music
from the film. Otherwise, the Powell sound that showed promise in the
first two sequels has devolved back into an anonymous rut, the drama of
the concept lost in the grating, churning mechanisms of the score's
faceless rhythms.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:
For John Powell reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.31
(in 51 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.16
(in 52,894 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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