It's been a long time since Hans Zimmer wrote a score by himself, without credited assistance from his Media Ventures protégés, but Tears of the Sun must take the biscuit - of the album's ten tracks, only two (totalling under five minutes) are solo efforts by Zimmer, and three of the remaining eight feature no contribution from Zimmer at all. This piecemeal approach leads to the somewhat predictable result of the score being seriously impaired by a lack of real consistency.

Antoine Fuqua's Tears of the Sun is a war movie starring Bruce Willis, and the score follows the modern war movie trend (started by Platoon) of the music being elegiac and mournful. The days of fervent patriotism being the way to approach a war story are long gone. But Zimmer (and his cohorts) add an extra twist here, with trendy world music ideas from Africa being added into the mix, along with the odd bit of "orchestral anarchy" (as the album describes it) - a kind of toned-down Black Hawk Down, I suppose.

An early highlight is "Heart of Darkness", with a gorgeously wistful trumpet solo grabbing the headlines. Another is "Kopano", cowritten by Lebo M, which brings immediate echoes of The Lion King - it's a rousing anthem whose title translates as "Unity", which is spread over three different tracks. But most of the first half-hour of the album is notable by its subtleness and deft-of-touch - it's reflective and melancholy - impressive and totally against what one may expect the score to sound like.

Only really in the last two tracks (each of which is over eight minutes long) does the album really spring to life. "The Jablonsky Variations on a Theme by HZ" goes all "Adagio for Strings" (plus wailing from Lisa Gerrard), but it's really wonderful. "Cameroon Border Post" is magnificent, by far the best piece on the album and probably the best of the year so far - layer upon layer of percussion mixed with a masculine horn theme mixed with Lebo M - it's like Zimmer's action scores of days gone by crossed with his modern MOR tendencies - a really great bit of action music. The final track is a combination of "The Journey" - a welcome respite after the ferocity of "Cameroon Border Post" - and the third part of "Kopano", which becomes joyous and celebratory as it draws the score to a close.

Tears of the Sun is a tricky one to assess, really: its final third is superb, the best stuff Zimmer has written (if indeed he did) in years; but the first two-thirds are mostly so subtle as to be somewhat dull. (So having said it was tricky to assess, I've assessed it - just goes to show the danger of making rash predictions, kids.)

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