The Tourist

James Newton Howard is a great composer, no doubt about it. His material for animated films surpasses most of the work set for that genre and his frequent collaborations with M. Night Shamalyn almost always produce work that is incredible in most standards. Unfortunately, he is one of the few good composers to fall into the Media Ventures trap showing that alot of his more recent scores feel unoriginal, as if they came from another composer entirely. With the massive flop The Tourist, Howard takes elements of those generic action scores and combines them with fairly good scoring.

JNH's score for Salt was mostly electronic, with the rare orchestral flourish. The Tourist fortunately manages to avoid overindulging in the media Ventures sound bank of synth noises and electric guitar. For the location of Venice, there is a great amount of romantic Italian themes that flow throughout the course of the score. For the rest, JNH gives it a very mysterious spy feeling. For the action music, JNH pretty much gives out a whole pallate of electronics mixed with orchestra. The result is better than Salt, but is still annoyingly generic. The characters of Elise and Alexander are also given a plain but nice romantic theme. Occasionally, peppered in and out of the album, JNH gives some very orchestral/piano performances ('A Very Nice Hotel'.) Also worth a mention is 'Dance In F', a beautiful waltz melody that was composed by Gabriel Yared.

Honestly, The Tourist is not a bad score. While the action music is boring and electronic, the orchestral does outweigh the bad. There really isn't anything to reccomend about The Tourist if you are one to enjoy James Newton Howard's more developed scores, but even then, it's a big breath of fresh air to hear an action score not fall into the exact same routine as all the others.