After seeing director Ron Howard’s sharp Frost/Nixon—and his Cinderella Man (a movie for these times)—I admit I had higher expectations for his new picture, Angels and Demons. I have not read the religious mystery novels by Dan Brown, and I do not plan to read them, upon which this sequel to Mr. Howard’s The Da Vinci Code is based.
Both pictures star Tom Hanks as Professor Robert Langdon, who apparently hasn’t learned much since he took on the Pope in tracing Jesus Christ’s ancestry in the first movie, a middling whodunit that made a mint. The plot here is more focused, notched to a time-sensitive conspiracy to destroy the Catholic city-state known as the Vatican. But Angels and Demons sounds more exciting than it is.
Adopting the same agnostic theme that essentially sanctions faith over reason in a Catholic-themed crime thriller, the Sony picture—opposed by the Vatican like the first movie—is another slog.
After the Pope dies, Dr. Langdon, an instantly forgettable female Italian scientist, and various Roman and Vatican policemen race against time to solve the puzzle—never mind why the perpetrator leaves a trail—save the most likely men to become Pope, and stop the supposedly secular villains from blowing up the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s Square and everything nearby. The powers that be call upon the professor to help amid shifty, cigarette-smoking cops and cardinals (this is Rome after all, where it seems like everyone smokes). By the time it’s over, the plot has had it every which way—going back and forth between condemning and condoning the Catholic Church, which has denounced and persecuted men of reason for centuries.
The Hanks character is reduced to spotting symbols without providing intelligible context and observing the obvious, such as a statue pointing east as the clue to head east. That he risks his own life without so much as a nickel—let alone access to the Vatican archives to finish his latest work—strains credulity and undermines his status. Without much of a protagonist, despite a thrilling church shootout, an exciting climax and good turns by Stellan Skarsgard, Ewan McGregor, and Pierfranceso Favino, Angels and Demons is in dire need of action and a reason to exist. Watching people, including the prof, preach that faith is a gift amid a string of interesting but unrelated facts—such as the secular origins of Christmas and English as the language of “radicals”—is ultimately neither angelic nor demonic enough to engage the imagination.