Buy it... only if you're a Smashing Pumpkins fan and are seeking Billy Corgan's 25 minutes of rocking, bone-headed score on the album.

Avoid it... if re-hashed James Horner ideas lifted directly from a plethora of other scores in his past would simply irritate you, not to mention the grossly disparate and painfully insufferable music from Corgan.

Ransom: (James Horner/Billy Corgan) Based on the same screenplay by Richard Price and Alexander Ignon that inspired the 1956 Glenn Ford movie of the same name, Ron Howard's Ransom of late 1996 places the director in exactly the genre at which he excels the most: group tension. The film was somewhat of a success, with the script perhaps needing two or three fewer loose ends, and Mel Gibson's performance is often credited for Ransom's appeal. The story offered the angry actor the opportunity to delve in a role that suits him best, seeking answers in an agitated state and ultimately trying to take the law into his own hands. The post-production of the movie wasn't free from hiccups, and one late-arriving piece of news was the rejection of composer Howard Shore's score for the film. Howard turned to previously scheduled collaborator James Horner with only a little over two weeks to spare until the score had to be dubbed into the film. At least Horner didn't go "Troy" on Shore's work and publicly trash the composer's capabilities in the industry. Making the situation for Ransom even muddier, though, was the studio's hiring of Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins rock band to write and perform music for several cues throughout the film as well. Given Shore's substantial work in the genre of urban thrillers, it's difficult to understand how his music eventually became an obvious emergency job by Horner, not to mention some replacement by the completely irrelevant music of Corgan. No matter who wrote the score, the script of Ransom involved much introversion while the two main stars of the plot play their intellectual game of cat and mouse. It's a "thinking man's suspense score," with occasional explosive bursts of energy as the hero and villain meet a few times under duress. From Horner, the resulting score is still mostly a drawn-out exercise in meandering ambience, while Corban's music fails to make any sense whatsoever and deserves practically no credit in either this review or the film itself. On Horner's part, it's easy to get the impression that Howard had tracked several cues from the composer's previous works into Ransom in an attempt to rectify the direction the film had seemed to take with Shore's music. What the listener hears in the end is a Horner score that is little more than easily identifiable pieces of his music from previous works strung together to supply a make-shift soundtrack for Ransom.