Movie Review: Angels and Demons

Angels fall, demons rise and Tom Hanks saves the day. Again.

This time, professor Langdon (Tom Hanks) is not on a quest to protecting Jesus’ only living descendent, but on a far simpler mission: to save the Catholic church from annihilation.

Not only from moral destruction, but from a truly physical threat. The divine particle that would end the core of the Eternal Church.

As we enter the first moments of the prequel to the Da Vinci Code, it becomes obvious, why Dan Brown did not become famous before the Da Vinci Code was published. For the first ten minutes of the film, we watch something that resembles a History Channel documentary, where a dull sounding narrator explains what happens in the Vatican when a Pope dies. The lavish scenes seem just too perfect in terms of light, colours and setting and it is immediately clear we are on a Hollywood set, rather than in the real Vatican City.

Once you have survived the first minutes relatively unscathed and relatively informed about the protocol of Papal elections, the true “adventure” begins.

The Divine Particle, an ‘anti-matter’ is produced in an Italian laboratory, from where it is  immediately stolen. A few hours later, an announcement comes, that four of the highest-ranking cardinals have been abducted, just as the Conclave, the election of a new Pope, is to begin. An organisation feared by the Church, called ‘Illuminati’, threatens to kill the cardinals and use the anti-matter to destroy the Vatican City. Up to this point, the plot just about hangs together.

Tom Hanks, Professor Robert Langdon, a symbologist, is flown to Vatican all the way from Harvard to try and help resolve the mystery.

The three significant characters are introduced in such a superficial fashion, that you have no problems realising, director Ron Howard was not in the mood he was in when films like ‘A beautiful mind’ or ‘Willow’ were so elegantly put together.

Commander Richter, the fiercely religious commander of the Swiss Guard is well portrayed by emotionally distant acting of Stellan Skarsgård. He seems to be one of the very few actors in the film, who actually does his job and acts.

The role of Camerlengo Patrick McKenna, played by Ewan McGregor, who guards the Papal office, before a Pope is elected, was just not believeable. This was not exclusively to the fault of the young Scottish actor, though. If we remember the Da Vinci Code, put together by almost exactly the same crew, we see that the writer of the screenplay, Akiva Goldsman, was joined here by David Koepp, who penned films like Jurrasic Park and the Spider-Man. The decision to bring him to Angels and Demons, proved a fatal flaw. Where tensions should rise slowly, the movie  becomes driven to a childishly overstressed climax in the most brutal of fashions. When we are just getting to know the characters, the film changes focus from thepeople, to the buildings of Rome. When you start to enjoy the city, we go back to McGregor’s ham acting.

Tom Hanks, who looked suitably lost in the Da Vinci Code, looks here like a stunt-man, rather than the leading actor who trousered $29 million for the role. His acting is pedestrian and, unfortunately, the femme fatale of the film, scientist Vittoria Vetra, played by an Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer, is no better.

The brightest star of Angels and Demons is Armin Mueller-Stahl, who plays the hard-core old school Cardinal Strauss. His acting is subtle, and he seems to realise how much weight every word spoken by one of the highest officials of an organisation uniting one billion believers, holds.

The plot of the film is never truly developed. We are told that the mysteriously sounding Illuminati have prepared this attack, yet we learn almost nothing about them. We learn some basic historic information in almost insultingly stupid exchanges between Hanks and Zurer. They seem like two documentary show anchors, trying to explain second-graders, why Gallileo was a great man.

The ambitions and motivations of  Mc Gregor’s character seem to be the key to the film, but we never learn what those ambitions actually are, let alone how they came to life.

Ona brighter note, the sound recording is surprisingly realistic. As the characters walk through Roman hallways, the sound becomes echoed and clears as they exit. Another of the few uplifting moments is the arrival of the cardinals to Conclave. The documentarist way in which Ron Howard deals with their everyday behaviour being interrupted by a historical moment, shows that we are looking at a film, made by one of the most sought-after Hollywood directors.

The brightness physically culminates, as we see an almost divine event, over the (mostly fake) Roman scenes. But this light, however, does not shed any light on the mystery of why a film that runs for 138 minutes and whose budget was so high, that it as yet remains unpublished by the studio, tells such a bad story in such a low-quality fashion. How can a story of one of most intriguing of secret organisations and one of most hidden yet highly public events, be boring, pedestrian and predictable is unclear.