Review: 'Angels and Demons'

There’s a lot of “It’s better than ‘The Da Vinci Code‘” flying around about director Ron Howard’s “Angels & Demons,” but that’s a lot like saying “It’s smarter than Nancy Pelosi” or “It’s less involved with the Nazis than George Soros.” For starters, A&D is not better than “Da Vinci,” which at least made some sense in helping us to understand how the mind of Symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) worked. Instead, this follow-up offers the same plodding plotting, outrageously dishonest Catholic bashing and numbing over-length … but now Langdon’s mental methodology is made completely incoherent to the point of gibberish.

The Pope is dead and to elect the new Holy Father, the ancient ritual of the Conclave is set to begin when the four Cardinals most likely to be chosen, the preferiti, are kidnapped. An ancient brotherhood known as the Illuminati takes responsibility. They have no demands and only wish to teach the Church a lesson for a violent purging of their scientific “free thinkers” hundreds of years ago and to do that they have promised to violently kill one Cardinal an hour, each in a different location, with the grand finale being the complete destruction of Vatican City with an anti-matter bomb stolen in the film’s opening scene.

The only clues offered that might save the day are also meant to further the Illuminati’s pro-science stance. Each clue is based on the four altars of science: earth, air, wind, and fire and to help unravel these symbols, Harvard Professor Robert Langdon is called in. Joining him is Vittorio Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), the gorgeous Italian scientist who helped create the anti-matter and the best hope to disarm it.

Before the story even has a chance to get going, “Angels & Demons” seals its fate as an episodic snoozer. For the first forty minutes, using awkward asides and clumsy exposition, the Langdon character uses every opportunity (and creates a few of his own) to chastise the Catholic Church for its historical secrecy, hatred of modern art, book burning, anti-science posture and a violent past borne of intolerance and fear of truth. Now, I’m no historian, so all of this might carry some credibility (or not), but I also understand that another word for Leftist Kryptonite is “context” and that never once is the overwhelming good the church does given a hearing (other than a single sentence tossed off by an unsympathetic character). The result of this relentless demonizing is to completely undermine the story’s tension and suspense. In other words: Why should we care whether or not this horrible institution survives? This may be the first mainstream Hollywood thriller where our protagonist isn’t racing to save something worth saving.

Make no mistake, the filmmakers here are smart professionals who have been around a while and who fully understand that in order to tell a compelling story the audience must be emotionally invested in the outcome. Unfortunately, with their relentless stream of (at best) out-of-context Catholic bigotry, they’ve made the conscious choice to undermine our sympathizing with the very institution in danger, and this is done at the expense of telling what could have been a much stronger story. You might as well make a film with someone in a race against time to save Charles Manson.

To qualify “Angels & Demons” as a movie would be naïve in the extreme. What we have here is a big, clumsy cannonball in the culture war launched, not by filmmakers, but by ideological warriors who know how to use film.

But even if Howard and company had wanted to tell the best story they could, A&D would still have its problems. Having one Cardinal executed each hour in the grisliest of fashions with the promise of a big boom to top it all off may sound like the perfect way to structure a thriller, but Harvard Symbologists are a long way from Indiana Jones.

Hanks must have been bored stiff. Langdon is all about the wash – rinse — repeat, but it goes like this: Puzzle to solve — furrow brow — light comes to eyes — point somewhere with authority – speak in academic tongues – dash off screen-left – jump in car – drive through ridiculously busy streets but still arrive barely in time in a way only Jack Bauer could relate to. But to the hero of “24’s” credit, with only an hour between murders, he’s never stopped to wash up, change clothes, enjoy a refreshing cup of coffee and chat up the help like Langdon does in a truly surreal moment.

As far as the most awkward moments, it’s hard to choose between the awkward stem cell debate between protesters the camera thrusts us into or the awkward shoe-horned shot at the energy industry near the film’s end. There might have been PETA posters on the Vatican walls but Howard likes his cinematography dark, so it was hard to tell.

Too much of the suspense is as contrived as these political moments trying to disguise themselves as a theme. Langdon’s a College Professor, Vetra’s a scientist, and yet the Vatican police sure do leave them alone in the most dangerous of circumstances an awful lot. But even then you never feel Langdon’s in any real danger. I counted at least three times where the killer could’ve easily offed him and didn’t.

For a PG-13 film, A&D is loaded with a surprising amount of graphic violence and the performances vary. Armin Mueller-Stahl comes off best as a senior Cardinal whose motives remain in doubt until the very end, Ewan McGregor enjoys some good moments until a preposterous climax undoes all his good work, Hanks is Hanks, and the fetching Zurer just doesn’t have a whole lot to do.

Big movie. Big stars. Hard to stay away. I get that. But if you remember that “Angels & Demons” wasn’t conceived with the goal of telling the best story possible, you won’t be as disappointed.