The Saint (The Saint)

I don't know whether it's the assignments and the lack of inspiration they provide or something else, but Graeme Revell isn't a composer whose music has much positive impact on me at all. His music for The Crow (which admittedly I've not heard) is popular, but outside of that, few of his scores have garnered much acclaim and veer between the passable (Red Planet) and the fairly awful (Pitch Black). However, for The Saint he was provided with a bigger canvas, a bigger budget and seems to have been inspired much more than usual. It's actually surprising and impressive given how feeble the Val Kilmer big screen version of the 'classic' TV series was, singularly failing to reach the quality of the Tom Cruise update of Mission: Impossible, although being vastly better than The Avengers, although watching dry paint is preferable to watching that.

The most notable thing about The Saint is that it's actually quite subtle. The main theme is not heroic action, in fact the most important is the love theme, a delicate John Barry (shades of the opening to You Only Live Twice in particular) style melody which is put to good use throughout the score. The orchestration is almost always feather light with plaintive strings or piano, even if during the Love Theme Finale, Revell allows it to flourish just a little more. There are of course some action sequences, the best of these being The River Chase, Kremlin Riot and The Fight (inspired title). Kremlin Riot is particularly notable with an imposing chorus against orchestra and some light synthetic percussion. The synth usage is subtle and just add a little something to the edge of the orchestra, but almost never come to the forefront.

Some of the suspense moments aren't quite as inspired, The Tunnels and Tempelhof being somewhat aimless synth and never amount to much. Fortunately these lapses are few and the score more than justifies its decent album length. It makes me wonder whether Revell simply needs some better films to work on so that he can actually write something interesting. The feeling that Revell might make a good replacement for David Arnold on the Bond films is actively encouraged. Most of Barry's Bond scores were not all action and certainly not as over the top as Arnold tends to be. Revell seems to have a lightness of touch that Arnold would do well to take on board from time to time. A superior and stylish modern action, thriller score worthy of repeatedly listens.