I remember when Michael Kamen's score for the first X-Men came out - everyone criticised it.  "No theme," they said.  "Boring," they said.  As usual, I disagreed - it was far from being one of Kamen's strongest scores, but it was light years ahead of any other score for a Bryan Singer movie and - yes - it had a good theme.

Well, here we go with the sequel, which everyone seems to love.  Again, I must disagree.  This time Singer's dreams came true as he got to work with John Ottman, but if I was a little sceptical beforehand (I've never heard anything by Ottman which suggested he'd be the right choice for a project like this - his best works all seem to be the much "smaller" movies) then I was convinced he made the wrong choice after hearing the album.  By far the strongest track (in fact, the only one that is really satisfying) is the opening "Suite from X2", which contains the main theme - sounds a little bit like second-rate Elfman, but it's still good.  

But then after that, everything seems to go downhill.  You can hear large snippets of Elfman, large snippets of Kamen, large snippets of Goldenthal, large snippets of Goldsmith, but you can't really hear much Ottman.  I kept waiting for the temp-track to end and the score to begin, but it never seemed to.  But that's not the only problem.  Each track seems pretty much indistinguishable from the one before, and the one after - there's just no musical personality on show.  And the orchestration is so bland - it's a miracle that six people could orchestrate something and it would end up sounding so bland.  Even the ending is bland.  One of my pet hates is albums that have "non-musical endings" in the sense that the music doesn't build up to anything or finish properly, and this is one of the worst offenders I can think of - it just seems to stop in the middle of something.  "We're Here to Stay", the track announces.  I don't think so.

Where's the emotion?  Where's the distinctive sections for different characters?  Where's the film's heart?  Where's the dramatic support?  Nowhere to be found on this album, unfortunately, which strikes me as being one of the most unambitious scores for a film like this that there has ever been.

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