The Next Three Days - Danny Elfman

Thrillers are a bit of a bugger of a genre to make interesting. If there's enough action, it's not too bad, but suspense is only interesting for so long. John Powell rarely let his Bourne scores get too boring, but it's the action music you remember the longest afterward and Alexandre Desplat made a good fist of his first forays into mainstream Hollywood scoring, notably Firewall and Hostage. Danny Elfman isn't perhaps the most obvious choice for a standard thriller, but he's scored a few in his time. I suppose Mission: Impossible counts and it's one of his finest scores, but the others - Extreme Measures and Article 99 amongst them - are fine enough, but don't musically set the world alight.

The Next Three Days is, however, rather more Extreme Measures than Mission: Impossible. The most striking thing is how little of it sounds like Elfman. Even outside of his most obvious mannerisms through the years, he has plenty of other musical fingerprints that give him away, but here I'd be hard pressed to identify the composer aside from on a couple of occasions. Indeed, the percussive suspense/action passages sound more like John Powell (perhaps a touch less percussion and more low key) than the tick-tick rhythms of Mission: Impossible. While it's not crucial that every score by a particular composer sounds like their others, when the tropes are as strong as Elfman's, they are missed when absent.

A lot of the score is actually fairly subdued, gentle piano and suspended strings are pleasing, albeit a touch slow going. Indeed, not a great deal happens until  Breakout (where it becomes more readily identifiable as Elfman as well) and a good number of the earlier cues could have been dropped at no great loss. After the thematic delights and richness of Alice in Wonderland it doesn't immediately leap out of the speakers. Elfman is always worth a punt, but a bit of judicious pruning might have made for a more readily enjoyable album. As with the Bourne films, a couple of Moby tracks complete the disc and, as with the Bourne films again, compliment the underscore quite nicely.

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