Entertaining, competent. Soundtrack too commercial and contrived

Rating: Null/10 (25 June 2002)

Overall, without a doubt a competent production and worth seeing.
I would like to express some disappointment about the way the soundtrack transpires. The soundtrack is not a creative achievement of wonderfully interactive and suitably mooded music - it is a committee-decided, money-maximising load of tripe. Granted, the music composed by John Williams is excellent but the way the music integrates with the movie is commercialism at its worst.
The jail-keeper plays the organ evidently just to ensure that the final soundtrack could contain a Bach organ piece (and even worse, one that is heard at weddings every weekend). When the unfinished symphony was played, it worked for a while but then I wondered what the hell this music was doing as it lost the mood... then I realised... they've got to sell the soundtrack! This is becoming very common nowadays and this type of commercialism really puts me off Hollywood movies altogether. Sell, sell, sell... If the music in movies keeps going down this track, I'll book a box of tickets to the independent theatre as soon as possible.