Lions for Lambs

Lions for Lambs adds to the seemingly endless stream of films arguing against (or giving it a stern talking to) American foreign policy, this time from the angle of politicians cocooned in their ivory towers sending in brave soldiers to win unwinnable wars (see Vietnam). Despite featuring Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, who also directs, it tanked at the box office and received pretty poor reviews. In what has been a busy half year, Mark Isham is at the scoring stage with a disc that functions halfway between his generally unexciting thrillers and his more impressive, dramatic works. The Lions for Lambs Main Title is not a great start, featuring as it does pretty standard contemporary thriller style percussion. It does admittedly build fairly effectively, but there isn't much to indicate something of much above average quality. Several of the later cues continue this theme, Firefight, One Handed and others. Isham mixes the percussion and orchestra quite effectively - most expertly in Get to Me! which is almost Matrix like in its cyclic string patterns - but they mostly aren't anything to write home about, plus are rather brief so don't build, John Powell like.

Where Isham scores almost all his points are in the more dramatic passages, an early highlight being the anguished Wall of Photos, while Our Capability is only disappointing due to its brevity. Having said that, it does blend fairly seamlessly into the unpromising Taxi Ride, but Isham's elegiac side comes to the fore. Sadly the electronics kick in halfway through, which is something of a shame. The culmination of these disappointingly brief episodes is the rather longer Last Shift which builds from a quiet, gently shifting series of string chords into a sublime trumpet solo. It's one of those pieces of music that is somehow to simple to possibly be as effective as it is, yet with such careful voicing of the chords, which always hint at underlying anguish, Isham pulls it off. After a brief burst of percussion, the End Credits continue the broad, but delicately scored mood, while adding an almost oriental instrumental which wouldn't have sounded out of place in Williams' Memoirs of a Geisha. Surprisingly, it works well here and is a fine end to a mixed album. Had the standard been uniform, it would be teetering on full marks, but the more mundane material makes it harder to recommend, although still worth a listen for the standout cues.