Paramount Music, out now

Lorne Balfe becomes the fifth composer to tackle a Mission: Impossible movie (standing on the shoulders of Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, Michael Giacchino and  Joe Kraemer) and delivers an action-packed soundtrack for Ethan Hunt and co.

Scoring a Mission: Impossible movie must be something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand your work is getting listened to by a huge audience (these movies make big money) while on the other hand people are just waiting to here that theme. As Bond composers know, it’s not a James Bond movie without the Monty Norman theme, and neither is a Mission: Impossible the real deal without Lalo Schifrin’s classic work. Wisely, Lorne Balfe (The Lego Batman Movie, Terminator Genisys) takes the iconic theme and interpolates it just when it’s needed and it’s not until track 5 – Good Evening, Mr Hunt – that it appears on this album, and even then it’s slowly threaded in as underscore.

Balfe gets to do more than just find ways to link variations on the Schifrin theme across the 26 tracks and 96 minutes. But while it doesn’t all sound like riffs on the Argentinian composer’s work, it does still have a certain familiarity. The percussion and strings of A Storm is Coming will likely remind you of Hans Zimmer’s cues in The Dark Knight, and that’s a theme (in both senses of the word) that’s echoed across the album. A Terrible Choice brings to mind Zimmer’s Mombasa from Inception and there are also echoes of Zimmer’s Interstellar.

All of this is not to say that Balfe doesn’t get to fashion his own sound, most apparent in lower key and more reflective cues like We Are Never Free and The Syndicate. But he also has great fun throwing in the choir and electronic trance-like beats in Change of Plan and some frenetic strings before becoming atonal and ambient in Fall, underscoring the movie’s HALO jump.

Verdict: It feels like a thin compliment to say that Lorne Balfe has delivered exactly the sort of score that you’d expect for a Mission: Impossible movie, but he does so with gusto, drafting in the classic theme when required, and punching up his own big action music tunes when required. 8/10

Nick Joy