CINEMA: Angels & Demons

Although this was a mega blockbuster hit for Dan Brown when it was published as a book, as a film Angels & Demons is anything but a thrilling page-turner.

Tom Hanks returns as academic Robert Langdon, the man who cracked the Da Vinci code, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Church. He is therefore, rather surprised when on the death of the incumbent Pope the Vatican turns to him to help discover the whereabouts of a group of the church’s leading cardinals who have been kidnapped. Langdon rushes to Rome where he discovers the cardinals are not the only things missing; an Italian scientist (Ayelet Zurer) working on the huge CERN particle accelerator project has also been summoned to discover the whereabouts of a container of anti-matter that has been stolen from CERN. Can Langdon, the scientist and the acting head of the church, the Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor) unravel a series of clues left by the Illuminati – a secret society sworn to oppose the church – in order to get to the anti-matter before it turns itself into a huge bomb, destroying not only the Vatican but much of Rome itself?

This being a Dan Brown story, conspiracy theory, symbols and mysterious signs abound as the movie turns into a mad dash from church to church around Rome. Because the background to the story is essential in order for viewers to have any clue as to what is going on, the exposition at the beginning is interminable – and yet still leaves things as clear as mud.  The location work around Rome is glorious but you don’t get to see enough of it as Langdon looks at a statue, immediately grasps its relevance and is racing off to the next clue in yet another chapel or crypt.  It’s kind of Indiana Jones with a cod-serious plot and absolutely no sense of humour and by the time the totally unbelievable ending comes around (revealing – shock horror – a plot within a plot within the bigger plot) you’ll probably have lost the plot!

The money is most definitely all up there on screen but it is the story itself that lets the film down, never giving itself or the audience time to take stock and work out if it is all actually hanging together.  Tom Hanks does an awful lot of pointing, McGregor’s Irish accent is appalling and the poor old Italian gendarmarie and the Vatican’s own Swiss Guard have to suffer a rising body count. It’s really all cloak and dagger, smoke and mirrors, and is about as convincing as Elvis on the moon.

Dee Pilgrim