Triple Frontier Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

4. The Jarring Music Choices

Though the incidental musical score from Disasterpeace is rock solid, Chandor makes the peculiar decision to include some rather out-of-place popular music throughout the film to slightly offputting effect.

An opening scene where military vet Pope (Oscar Isaac) is travelling by chopper, for instance, is set to Metallica's "From Whom the Bell Tolls" and elicits more of a chuckle than the presumably badass feel Chandor wanted to evoke.

Elsewhere Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain" is invoked in heavy-handed fashion when Redfly (Ben Affleck) departs from his daughter to start the mission, and the film's end credits are bizarrely scored to Metallica's "Orion."

These songs are all great, no doubt, but their inclusion here feels both lazy and inappropriate, as though Chandor brought the movie in under-budget and couldn't think of another way to spend the excess cash.

None of these scenes would play any worse with a musical score in place or even no score at all, and using pop music just feels like a bit of a cheap trick for an artist as talented as Chandor.