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A review by JAMES SOUTHALL

Before he went onto bigger and better things with LA Confidential, Curtis Hanson directed this engaging adventure film in 1994 with Meryl Streep and David Strathairn playing the parents of a family spending their vacation on the rapids of a river but ending up being tormented and terrorised by Kevin Bacon - the same thing happened to my family once on a holiday in Rhyl, it really was a bummer.  Damn that pesky Kevin Bacon, he surely is a bounder and a scamp.

After a pleasant performance of the old folk tune "The Water is Wide" by Cowboy Junkies comes Jerry Goldsmith's "Gale's Theme", a pleasant and lilting ballad that is a kind of cross between The Waltons and Rudy, if you can imagine that.  It's a great start to the album but the rest of the score is fairly uneven.  "Wade Goes Under", the first big action track, shows off all the good and the bad points; a nice little action motif is used but when the action really gets going, Goldsmith employs a horrible synth percussion effect that is so limp and unsatisfying that it drags his predictably-terrific orchestral music down several notches.  When he uses timpani instead the results are considerably more satisfying.

Of course, suspense music rears its ugly head sometimes, such as in "Tom Hangs On", which is effective enough but comes across as being a lightweight version of something Goldsmith would do many times better a few years later in The Edge (an excellent score for an excellent film).  The sense of this score being like weaker versions of other ones actually happens another couple of times, such as in "Vision Quest", whose use of synths and harp solo clearly recalls Medicine Man, but it doesn't stand up nearly so well; it's still a pleasant piece, just not as good as the composer has written on other occasions.  I suppose the score's centre-piece is the ten-minute action finale "Vacation's Over", but sadly it is rather disappointing, being somewhat slow and ponderous and without Goldsmith's usual incredible levels of energy (and again dogged by that awful synth noise, probably the worst the composer has used since the infamous whooshing noises in Supergirl); only as it nears its conclusion does it reach the heights so often associated with Goldsmith.

It's perhaps slightly unfair to say that this is "Goldsmith on autopilot" (it does feature an outstandingly beautiful theme and a few other tracks of high quality) but the fact remains that he has scored this type of thing better both before and since.  One of his weaker scores of the 1990s.

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Tracks

1. The Water is Wide Cowboy Junkies (3:10)
2. Gale's Theme (2:24)
3. Big Water (2:53)
4. Wade Goes Under (3:18)
5. Tom Hangs On (3:21)
6. Vision Quest (2:57)
7. Little Niagra (2:40)
8. Same Old Story (2:12)
9. Vacation's Over (9:51)
10. Family Reunion (5:47)