The Hunted (Score)

Brian Tyler

In this tale of a Special Forces officer pursuing one of his trainees running amok in the civilian world, William Friedkin tackles Hollywood's one-on-one chase genre with typical skill and style. But given the film's scope and built-in expectations, budding young composer Brian Tyler (The Children of Dune, Darkness Falls) was given the task of forging a near wall-to-wall soundscape of musical tension and suspense, a job that's produced veritable reams of McAction music cues in recent years. Tyler doesn't so much reinvent those cliches in his powerful, rhythmically charged work here as infuse them with some welcome new musical curiosity and intriguing flashes of orchestral color. One can sense the composer pushing his thematic constraints throughout; even his uses of electronic coloration have a fresh, edgy quality that further sets his work apart from the norm. If the composer and his co-orchestrators occasionally display their affection for Bernard Herrmann in their tense, timbre-expansive work here, it seems a welcome acceptance of the master's challenge to meet the constraints of genre with determined musical vision. --Jerry McCulley

The Hunted (Score) Album: