A decent if not brilliant Patrick Doyle score this is still miles better than most of the other tuneless dreck out there today. Doyle writes huge, sweeping, old-fashioned thematic film music, which has fallen out of favor. It is vibrantly orchestral and the LSO plays it beautifully. He seems to have John Barry's gift for scoring the film that could have been, instead of the lousy one that is. (By all accounts the film itself here is unwatchable.) This doesn't scale the heights of "Hamlet," "Frankenstein," "Est/Ouest" or "Great Expectations," but much like last year's "Eragon," he has written a gorgeous score that I can't stop playing.
