In Angels And Demons, Tom Hanks returns (without the bad haircut) as symbol academic Robert Langdon from The DaVinci Code. This time, the very existence of the Catholic Church is on the line as terrorists steal an anti-matter bomb from the CERN laboratory in Switzerland and hide it somewhere within Vatican City. The batteries are slowly dying, and once they go for good, the containment field that surround the anti-matter materials will collapse (this is starting to sound like an episode of Star Trek) and the anti-matter will ignite into a really big and nasty bomb that will blow away all of Vatican City, along with a good chunk of Rome.
And this attack couldn’t have happened at a worse time, just when the college of Cardinals have assembled to choose a new pope. Langton is called in on the case when the body of the lab worker at CERN is discovered to have been branded with the mark of the Illuminati, an ancient enemy and critic of the Church’s past repression of scientific advancement. The Illuminati not only have the anti-matter bomb, but they’ve also abducted the four favored cardinals--the men who’re most likely to be chosen as the next pope--and plan to execute them hour by hour, until the Holy See itself goes boom.
The DaVinci Code film was a lame potboiler of a movie
because director Ron Howard slavishly followed the lame, potboiler book by
author Dan Brown. Brown’s earlier novel, Angels And Demons, is just as
overwrought and melodramatic--however, this time, Howard chose to deviate from
the main plot. Writers David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman wisely jettisoned the
majority of the silliest of plot points of Brown’s novel; creating a lean, mean
thriller in the process. Gone are the hoary, as subtle as a sledgehammer plot
devices that are on display in Brown’s novel in favor of a slightly more
sophisticated, Hitchcock-type flavor--with plenty of twists--that works very well.
Hanks is watchable once again as Langton. It’s an interesting change of pace to root for a hero who doesn’t fight with his fists, but with his mind. And Ayelet Zurer is passable in the role as Hank’s female sidekick, a part which is becoming as interchangeable as that of the Bond girls. Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgård and Armin Mueller-Stahl round out the fine cast. And Rome, the city, has never looked better. Lacking the pseudo-controversial baggage of The DaVinci Code, Angels And Demons is just a fun romp through Rome, with Hank’s character trying once more to unravel obscure clues just in the nick of time.
--SF
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