In what must be one of the surprise hits of the year, Jim Carrey and Morgan Freeman star in Bruce Almighty, in which God (Freeman) gets so fed up with one man's complaints about how he runs things that he bestows him (Carrey) with divine powers for a day, to see how he would cope.  Well.  It's from director Tom Shadyac, who previously gave us the masterpieces Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Patch Adams, not to mention Dragonfly.

Varese Sarabande's soundtrack CD is unusual for the label in that it features only a fairly short suite of score, and a host of non-original songs from the movie.  The songs are an odd bunch, from Joan Osborne's excellent "One of Us" to the posthumous Elvis hit "A Little Less Conversation" (I'm sure there are those who wonder whether Elvis had divine powers himself) to Fatboy Slim's "The Rockafeller Skank", which is certainly uncontaminated by quality.  Film music fans will no doubt be interested to hear that it contains something by John Barry as a sample, though I've listened to it a couple of times and haven't heard it yet.

Debney's score is the kind of heavenly stuff you might expect from the movie.  It's all incredibly sweet and liable to make a trip to the dentist in order, but it's attractive stuff, and actually being presented as a 15-minute suite is probably a good way of doing it.  The main theme is disconcertingly similar to Michael Kamen's glorious Band of Brothers main title, and this gives a useful exercise in comparing a first-rate film composer with a journeyman.  Whereas Kamen's theme is a perfect model of inspirational yet restrained scoring, Debney's is pure schmaltz and just goes too far.

As well as the obvious Kamen rip-off, there are a few James Hornerisms that are quite blatant too - not a case of taking a melody this time - but in orchestration, it's presumably a case of trying to emulate the success of The Rocketeer or something.

Debney could probably write this sort of stuff before breakfast, and despite the similarities to other things, the snippet of his score we hear is never less than pleasant to listen to.  15 minutes of score is probably not enough to satisfy Debney fans, and seven diverse songs is probably not going to satisfy that audience, so I'm not entirely sure who will be attracted to the album, but it's decent enough.

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