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BANGKOK DANGEROUS
Stylish, entertaining thriller score
 A review by JAMES SOUTHALL

Music composed by
BRIAN TYLER

Rating
* * *



Performed by
THE CITY OF PRAGUE PHILHARMONIC
conducted by
BRIAN TYLER

Orchestration
DANA NIU
ANDREW KINNEY

Engineer
STEPHEN KRAUSE
Music Editor
GARY KRAUSE
Produced by
BRIAN TYLER

Album running time
77:37

Released by
LIONSGATE RECORDS
Catalog number
LIOG20019

Album cover copyright (c) 2008 Lionsgate Entertainment; review copyright (c) 2008 James Southall.

In Bangkok Dangerous, Nicolas Cage plays a hit-man who is beginning to develop a conscience and wonder whether assassinating people is really a decent way of earning a living.  Of course, it involves him taking on one last job before hanging up his gun, and everything starts to go horribly wrong.  It's set in Bangkok (I suppose you may have guessed that); I've been to Bangkok and am pleased to report that nobody tried to assassinate me - though a few sellers were particularly aggressive at the fruit market.  As is the current way of things, the film is a remake of a Hong Kong film of 1999 from the same directors - the Pang brothers (one of whom is, wonderfully, called Oxide Pang - which sounds very much like the sort of name Nicolas Cage's characters usually have in Jerry Bruckheimer films).

Providing the score is the prolific Brian Tyler, who over the last few years has become one of the most popular providers of action scores in Hollywood.  These vary between orchestrally-dominated thrills in scores like Aliens vs Predator: Requiem and more rock-based things like The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.  Bangkok Dangerous is somewhere in between those two styles - The City of Prague Philharmonic has the dominant voice here, but is augmented by guitars and percussion.  If anything, perhaps this might be compared with Tyler's music for War - but fortunately it doesn't have that score's pretty blatant John Powell knock-offs.

The album opens with a surprisingly lyrical piece, an impassioned piece for strings being followed by an attractive piano theme which has a similar feel to some of James Newton Howard's scores for M. Night Shyamalan.  "Assassin" introduces an anthemic action theme which is also very enjoyable.  Much of the rest of the score is slightly more chilled-out, with the occasional burst into explosive action, and it makes for a very enjoyable album.  Like most of Tyler's recent releases it packs as much onto the CD as possible (77 minutes here) and the music doesn't nearly sustain such a long running time - it would sound so much better with the filler cut out - but this is the model way of releasing things right now so it's no surprise any more.  This is a nice score, professionally-done and pleasant to listen to.

Tracks

  1. Bangkok Dangerous (3:13)
  2. Assassin (1:45)
  3. Main Title (2:31)
  4. Fon's Theme (2:22)
  5. The Pupil (2:32)
  6. Bangkok Reflections (2:00)
  7. Runner (2:47)
  8. Pursuit (2:45)
  9. Underground Temple (1:45)
  10. Prague (4:13)
  11. Silent Retribution (4:27)
  12. Explosive Device (1:15)
  13. Gangland Grenade (2:03)
  14. The Hitman (2:08)
  15. Elephant (2:10)
  16. Rain (1:28)
  17. Scoping Out the Hit (2:14)
  18. Second Thoughts (2:28)
  19. Pool Assassination (2:50)
  20. What I Do (3:08)
  21. Hide and Seek (1:53)
  22. Floating Market (1:37)
  23. River Chase (3:55)
  24. The Performance (1:22)
  25. Bangkok Downtown (2:18)
  26. Knife Test (2:46)
  27. Fire (3:40)
  28. The Meeting (:54)
  29. The Compound Shootout (4:11)
  30. Yearning (1:36)
  31. Fate (3:29)