Danny Elfman & Chris Bacon.

Sony Music

Out Now on CD and download.

 

Danny Elfman has been producing quirky scores since the 1980s, when he first came to fame with the scores for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and Batman, and of course also composed the theme music for the original Men In Black back in 1997. Chris Bacon has been composing additional music tracks for Elfman’s scores for a few years now, and so it’s nice to see him get a full co-composer credit here.

If only it was for a more listenable album,

Basically this score – there is another soundtrack album with the songs – has two modes: quirky bubbling along based on remixing the theme, and action-cure drumming along based on speeding up the percussion and getting louder, regardless of whether it’s recognizably the MIB theme. (There don’t appear to be any other themes worth mentioning in this.) Basically, that’s it. You could literally put Elfman’s original theme on a loop for an hour and achieve much the same effect by adjusting the volume every five minutes.

Verdict: It almost certainly works well in the movie, because it’s clearly meant to be jaunty background music that picks up the pace when something happens on screen, but as a listening experience separated from the movie, it’s comedy lift muzak from 1997. 4/10

David A McIntee