Gone (Soundtrack) by David Buckley - Review

The Thrills are Gone
Review by Edmund Meinerts

Flying under the radar even by February’s standards is the thriller GONE, in which nobody believes Amanda Seyfried when she says she was kidnapped and nearly killed. Few people saw it and fewer still liked it – at the time of writing, it had barely made back a third of its $22 million budget. Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia, in his first Hollywood venture, sought the services of DAVID BUCKLEY to compose the film’s score. A protegé of the rather better-known HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS, BUCKLEY only has a handful of solo projects to his name. Chief among these is the enjoyable, mostly-orchestral, Oriental-tinged THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM, but hopefuls expecting any of that quality in GONE are likely to walk away disappointed.

Instead, and unsurprisingly, BUCKLEY mostly channels his mentor’s thriller style for this assignment. If you’ve heard any of GREGSON-WILLIAMS’ scores for either Tony Scott (MAN ON FIRE, UNSTOPPABLE etc.) or Ben Affleck (GONE BABY GONE and THE TOWN, the latter co-composed by BUCKLEY), you can probably already guess what GONE sounds like: a mostly low-key affair with strings and piano for the character moments, and plenty of synthetic percussion and effects for the suspense and action sequences. It’s an effective style, but hardly original; nor does it make for particularly interesting listening when divorced from the visuals.


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