> I would say this deserves more like three-and-a-half to four stars for the tonal ruckus it raises. Film was okay. It's of personal note to me because it was one of the first 'new' scores that I was excited for when I started listening to film music, so I was quite hyped! Nostalgia talking, probably.

Our divergent opinions perhaps speaks to an issue I've started noticing more and more with with comedy movie music that plays it 'straight' as a quasi-genre parody. The composer is basically trying to approximate the feel of what you get from the more serious version, but they also seem to have to avoid coming close to being just as distinctive (if not more so) as the thing they are pointing you towards. Sometimes it means not having a strong main theme, and sometimes it means just being a little more on the generic side - the latter especially true of various 'caper jazz' scores that try approximating Bond or Mission: Impossible tones while being largely forgettable (heck, note the reviews for the Johnny English scores Christian recently put up).

Sure, sometimes there are exceptions - Airplane! obviously, plus A Million Ways to Die in the West and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid which memorably poke fun at their movie by adhering to genre music conventions. But This Is the End gets me thinking 'hey, that was kind of like The Omen!' without being able to recall a note of it. It competently fulfills its purpose and nothing more. I'd argue this proves Elmer Bernstein was the best at doing not-silly scores for silly movies, but directors don't tend to ask for stuff like that anymore, and it's plausible Henry Jackman would've written scores like Spies Like Us if he was working in the 1980s.

I agree that the film's so-so, and it probably hasn't aged well. That's not necessarily a problem unique to it, more that just stuff like Channing Tatum in a gimp suit probably wouldn't be as amusing the second go-round now that the shock value's gone.