And when it came to crafting the music for Russian director and Night Watch series creator Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted, based on JG Jones and Mark Millar’s graphic novels about a cubicle nerd who quickly discovers his fate to join an elite squad of assassins, Elfman was able to use an approach that was deeply personal to him and incredibly beneficial to the Russian filmmaker. Having told the Jewish Journal that he finds himself “drawn to [his] Russian and Eastern European musical roots,” since he considers that his “strongest link to [his] Jewish background is musical,” he admits that although he’s never been there, “I feel a kinship with Russia,” which is “very much a part of.. [his] consciousness.”
You hear this fairly quickly into the roughly fifty minute running time of Wanted’s Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Consisting entirely of Elfman’s music, the phenomenal score opens with the musician’s first vocal performance in three years (since Burton’s Corpse Bride) with the catchy, masculine and guitar fueled vehicle “The Little Things.” Launching right into a heavily techno and eclectic, largely Russian and Eastern European influenced score, he follows up “The Little Things with fourteen instrumental tracks guaranteed to hook you on the first listen alone and Wanted just gets stronger with repeat plays.
While usually with films scores, one main musical theme or motif gets recycled ad nauseam throughout or some songs are so ridiculously short (like 45 seconds), repetitive and dull that it’s fairly easy to spot the stand-outs. As far as Wanted is concerned, there isn’t one track that sounds out of place. Much more successful in this film critic’s opinion than the film itself, Wanted is Elfman at his very best and you can see a brief interview with the graphic novel creators, Elfman and journalist Rebecca Murray.
Building towards the intensity to come with his sweeping orchestral track “Success Montage,” that’s fairly heavy on the use of strings until more than halfway through it’s infused with some electronic techno, it alternates between the classic and the modern in a way that sets up what’s to come. We hear some of the hook from this track throughout the album although he slows down the pace with what sounds like Monks chanting in the aptly named “Fraternity Suite,” and mixes things around considerably until the immediate four-star track, “Fox in Control.”
Nearly painting the action with the music itself, it makes the ideal counterpart to Angelina Jolie’s tough but sexy character Fox and flows very well into “Welcome to the Fraternity,” which is uniformly excellent but ultimately serves as a bridge into the album’s change-of-pace track “Fox’s Story.” “Story” begins with a melancholic and somber opening but adds in beautiful female vocalization past the one minute mark that’s deceptively angelic and precious. Later, we realize that despite Fox’s surface beauty, there’s a deadly woman underneath who is revealed musically after three minutes when the violent sounds of the electric guitar come in.
Article comments
1 - Master RedyVa
“Every Day Is Exactly the Same” by Nine Inch Nails, “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” by Rupert Holmes, and “Time to Say Goodbye” by Andrea Bocelli (& Sarah Brightman- plays while Fox and Wesley kill a man in a limousine) are all absent on the soundtrack. The album is just the score with the Elfman sung “The Little Things.” The album is an Elfman project/score rather than a true soundtrack.
“Exterminator Beat,” “Fox in Control,” “Revenge,” and “The Little Things” are the shining moments of the album. Master RedyVa really liked the over-all string driven sounds of the score. RedyVa agrees that Elfman + strings + guitars + techno = frantically paced rock ‘n’ roll that is worth listening to more than a few times. The pop-masculine and guitar fueled love song “The Little Things” really complements the film’s strong sense of machismo.