Red Heat

This is possibly one of the least inspiring James Horner scores I've heard. The opening and end titles are a superb Russian choral work, that Poledouris' Hunt for Red October later echoed. Then the crushing blow, this Russian choral work is in fact by Prokofiev from his cantata, 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution. This is actually quite an obscure work and has only recently been released on CD and so it's easy to see why Horner picked it as the opening titles. Admittedly, Horner has messed around with it to beef it up someone. The original movement from the cantata was called The Philosophers and so was somewhat more cerebral, but Horner makes it robust and more exciting.

The rest of the score is pretty much action music with rock sensibility interspersed with even less inspiring plunking suspense moments, in fact the only decent central cue is Russian Streets which is actually quite entertaining, but rather short. Credit goes to Horner for some of the interesting weird noises he manages to introduce over the bass background beat, but otherwise it's not really enough to be particularly interesting overall. Since it's rather hard to find these days, I would only suggest it's worth getting if found cheap, otherwise there's little point. Buy the Prokofiev cantata instead and find one of the dozens of much better Horner scores out there.