Original Soundtrack - Corruptor [Original Soundtrack] (CD)

All Music Guide

Here's one for the when-pigs-fly files: a good rap album with Mark Wahlberg's name on it. Granted, Wahlberg doesn't sing on this disc; he co-starred in The Corruptor with Chow Yun-Fat (great chemistry, that). The film bought it pretty quick, but not before New Line Cinema authorized two soundtracks: the film score from Carter Burwell and, here, a generous helping of rap from Jive Records billed as The Corruptor: The Soundtrack. There was a time when soundtracks actually featured songs from the movie, but over the years labels have taken liberties with that rule, noting that most people forget which songs were used in the movie anyway (when they don't forget the whole movie altogether). The Corruptor does feature some songs from the film, leaves out others, and fills the holes with Jive Records' stable of artists. Yeah, you're being marketed to with this disc, but credit Jive with making the most of a limited opportunity. In fact, the disc performed better than the movie, cracking the Top 50 and generating the popular "5 Boroughs." It's unlikely you'll enjoy everything on here, any more than you'll like every candy in a Whitman's Sampler. Some of the artists, like Jane Blaze, are relative unknowns; others, like Mobb Deep and Jay-Z, are major-league. Still, not every major-league artist comes through with a hit here. Jay-Z's "More Money, More Cash, More Hoes [Remix]" is less than stellar, U.G.K. is tapped for Dirty Money's "Take It Off" (which they should have), and the attempt to work "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" into "Feel the Rush" is just God-awful. But that leaves over a dozen tracks that get it right, from the sweet samples of "The Corruptor's Execution" to Murda Mil's "Have You Heard of Me?" As you'd expect, gangster themes and naughty words are part of the mix -- they don't call it The Corruptor for nuthin' -- but as "explicit advisory" discs go this is pretty tame. The last track? Well, that's actually from Carter Burwell's film score. Just a little bit of cross-cross-marketing is all.

- Dave Connolly, All Music Guide