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A review by JAMES SOUTHALL

Joel McNeely had the misfortune in 1998 to score two of the biggest turkeys of all time, The Avengers and Soldier, which grossed just over $14m compared with its $75m budget.  A massive box office dud starring Kurt Russell!?  Who would have thought it.

Rescued from the wreckage is Joel McNeely's impressive score.  This is the kind of lousy film you'd expect Jerry Goldsmith to be scoring, so it seems appropriate that there is a distinctly Goldsmithian air to the music, from the militaristic main theme which could come from any number of Goldsmith scores (Chain Reaction, Executive Decision etc) though it doesn't directly resemble any of them, right down to the romantic finale ("Redemption") which is something Goldsmith always seems to do in his action/thriller scores, indeed down to the album's cover art and design!

McNeely's most ingenious invention here is his use of an acoustic stereo trumpet effect, where he has three banks of trumpets, one on the left, one in the middle and one in the centre, and then plays them off against each other through the action music.  The fact that they are muted means they have a rather shrill effect (I wonder whether it would have been more effective had they been allowed a slightly more pure sound) but even so, it works very well.  Some of the action music (and, well, in truth virtually the whole album is action music, but in particular I'm thinking of "The Chain Fight", "Soldier Ships Arrive" and "The Final Battle") is absolutely terrific and easily equals anything Goldsmith was writing at the time.

It's a great pity that McNeely doesn't get more work these days because he is such a talented composer who demonstrated that he was more than capable of scoring family movies in the style of John Williams and action movies in the style of Jerry Goldsmith, two qualities that would seem to make him virtually the ideal film composer!  Soldier is rollicking, great stuff that will likely blow your speakers apart.  The only problem is that the album is so short - but then, when it finishes, you can just play it all over again!

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Tracks

1. New Soldiers vs Old Soldiers (2:56)
2. The Chain Fight (2:29)
3. Welcome to Hell (2:44)
4. Todd is Exiled (3:05)
5. Soldier Ships Arrive (4:58)
6. One Against Many (4:11)
7. The Final Battle (6:20)
8. Redemption (2:10)