• Composed by David Holmes
• Silva Screen / 2012 / 35:30

Steven Soderbergh has been awfully busy since he decided to retire, with Haywire being his fourth film in two years.  It’s not your typical Soderbergh film, when described in outline form – an action thriller, with Gina Carano as a “covert operative” who gets more than she bargained for when sent to Barcelona to retrieve a hostage.  Of course, in reality, it’s entirely a Soderbergh film and not at all your typical action thriller.  Musically, the director tends to rotate around a group of his favourite composers, and this film sees the return of Ulsterman David Holmes, scoring his fifth film for Soderbergh.  Holmes is not known primarily as a film composer, but his work for cinema does include a range of films as diverse as Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen.

Joking aside, his film music has been very entertaining stuff.  Haywire is no exception – it’s got a funky vibe to it which recalls those great thriller scores of the 1970s, it’s got some decent tunes in it, the whole thing is stylish and cool.  The only problem – if it can be called that – is that it really is the type of thing Holmes could do in his sleep.  Even though the number of films he’s worked on is pretty small, it’s not hard to guess what a David Holmes score for a Steven Soderbergh movie is going to sound like, and there is precious little which could be considered “new” here.  It’s full of life, there’s a dash of humour (perhaps a little too self-satisfied humour in places) and it’s huge fun – if you like his past scores for the director, you’ll like this; if not, you won’t.  The muted trumpets, the guitar riffs, the wonderful percussion – it’s all stylish stuff, it works perfectly for a film full of double-cross after double-cross – there may not be a great deal of substance to it, but it’s very hard not to like it.  Silva Screen has released a CD in Europe – it’s only available as a download in America and elsewhere.  *** 1/2

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