Angels and Demons

2009-05-18
By Sergio A. Mims

CAST:  Tom Hanks
               Ewan McGregor
               Ayelet Zurer
               Stellan Skarggard
               Armin Mueller-Stahl
               Pierfrancesco Favino
WRITTEN BY: David Koepp and Akiva Goldman
DIRECTED BY: Ron Howard
***   THREE STARS

Ron Howard’s follow up to his massively successful 2007, $800 million-grossing movie The DaVinci Code, Angels and Demons, is a textbook example of a mindless summer Hollywood blockbuster. It’s got all the bells and whistles. It’s fast paced, enormously engaging with high gloss production values, a riveting story and undeniably entertaining. It also happens to be completely preposterous, dumb and at times as nutty as a fruit cake, but that’s what also what makes it so much fun to watch.

It’s the kind of nonsense in which the hero’s clothes always somehow miraculously appear spotless and pressed clean time and time again despite being almost drowned more than once, nearly set on fire and filthy with centuries old dust from searching though endless secret passageways and catacombs.

Based on hack novelist Dan Brown’s earlier novel written before Code, Angels and Demons is silly nonsense that knows exactly what it is. Howard smartly moves the film’s 140 minute running time along at a breathless pace and handles the material with a seriousness and solemnity that it actually doesn’t deserve but is needed since a more self conscious humor would have turned it into a disaster.

Once again Tom Hanks returns as Harvard professor and symbolist Robert Langdon, who despite making some enemies at the Vatican during his last adventure, is surprised when the Vatican officials this time approach him for desperately needed help. The current Pope has just died (under suspicious circumstances it’s revealed later) and the four leading candidates to become the next Pope have all been kidnapped and are threatened to be killed one by one by the Illuminati, the sinister secret organization of people out to avenge the Vatican’s barbaric suppression of scientific thought and research.

If that isn’t enough, they’ve also stolen a container of highly combustible anti-matter from a research lab and is threatening to explode it, destroying the Vatican and good size chunk of Rome.

So Hanks along with an Italian scientist (Zurer) who is searching for the antimatter device, race from one end of Rome to another with only a few hours to go, following clues to find the bomb and save the cardinals as if it were an episode of 24.

The film becomes a series of elaborate cliff hangers and contrived plot twists with plenty of possible evil mastermind suspects including the head of the Swiss Guard (Skaragard) the recently deceased Pope’s assistant (McGregor) and another cardinal possibly in line for the Papacy and enough grisly murders to satisfy any fan of the horror and the macabre.

Naturally this being a summer Blockbuster, all the characterizations are one dimensional with Hanks as a modern day Sherlock Holmes getting a major workout running at a while spouting reams of story exposition while his sultry Israeli co-star Zurer has mainly nothing to do except look good while running after Hanks.

The one real disappointment is the obvious second rate CGI effects used mainly to recreate authentic forbidden interior locations in Rome and the Vatican and especially during the film’s “seconds before the bomb goes off” climax. It’s amazing that so many films with their astronomically huge budgets still manage tocreate cheesy effects that rival Roger Corman B-movie classics.

Still Angels and Demons delivers on its intent - mindless, stupid fun designed to be more the candy floss for your brain. On that level it achieves success very well indeed.

Film critic, lecturer and festival consultant Sergio Mims covers all things film from the city that works, Chicago. He is a regular contributor to EbonyJet.com.