Abandon

According to the reviews I've read, Abandon is a poor thriller with a pointlessly shocking and unbelievable ending. Starring Katie Holmes, the nauseatingly clever one from Dawson's Creek, it seems to prove that films starring actors from popular TV shows are rarely much good. It also stars Benjamin Bratt and Charlie Hunnan, that latter who has done well moving from UK television kids drama Biker Grove, to the distinctly adult Queer as Folk, to star in a Hollywood film, he must be doing something right. Composer Clint Mansell's credits aren't exactly high profile, but having scored Sandra Bullock in Murder by Numbers, is clearly moving up the ladder, albeit slowly. Unfortunately, Abandon doesn't show a lot of promise, at least in purely musical terms.

Reviewing scores like this is difficult and depressing as there isn't a great deal that can be said about the music, it's atmospheric underscore that is certainly fine when sustaining the film's tension, but can't hold its own on disc. The opening is promising, a Craig Armstrong style mixture of synth percussion and wordless vocals makes an effective Main Title (and is pretty much reprised for the End Titles), but to say that it peaks early is an understatement. Whenever the wordless vocal appears, the music is enlivened briefly, but these moments are rare and otherwise, it plonks away on piano, with the occasional drum loop and various synth effects. It wins points for atmosphere, but loses so many for dullness that there really isn't much left to recommend. It doesn't help that there are so many short tracks which add almost nothing. Had anything under a minute been dropped then it might have left enough of the percussive tracks - the final few are relatively effective - to carry it along, but with so many pauses for tracks that add nothing, any momentum is lost. Some scores are best left in the film and this is one of them.