Once again replacing another composer in the last minute (this time Randy Newman), Jerry Goldsmith needed the help of Joel McNeely to complete the music of Air Force One, the last action film of Wolfgang Petersen and Harrison Ford; curiously, the time urgency which they worked does not seem have affected especially to the final result of the score, such and as can be listened in the published CD that it does not include a note of McNeely's material. Goldsmith and his orchestrator Alexander Courage appeal to an orchestra more noisy and spectacular of what is customary, without hardly support of electronic elements (whose abuse, sometimes, was resulting a ballast in many of his works), with a marked presence of metal and percussion. In many moments we can almost listened to the Goldsmith of the seventies, and the unavoidable patriotic tone of the score (from its main theme listened at the beginning in The Parachutes) lets step to eight highly adrenaline charged cues, among those we can emphasized The Hijacking, with its more than seven aggressive and wild minutes, and its immediate follower No Security, the only one backwater of peace of the record, and which includes one of those emotive and romantic themes that seem to leave so easily from the pen of the American composer. Shame that the music of McNeely is not included, but the servitudes of the Record Labels tend, generally, to coincide scarcely with those of the fans. A.L.

/ VARESE SARABANDE VSD5825 / 36'