Angels & Demons

This sequel to The Da Vinci Code has better action! It has a better story! Tom Hanks has better hair! Yet, it’s not awesome. It’s more like just entertaining enough (and made slightly better if you get some candy or fresh popcorn).

Hanks is back as Robert Langdon – a Harvard professor and symbologist who knows more about the Bible and religious history than Billy Graham and Joel Osteen combined. The Pope has passed away, and Langdon has been summoned to the Vatican because the four leading candidates to replace him have been kidnapped by the mysterious Illuminati. Only Langdon and his encyclopedic knowledge can save them, if he can find the Illuminati hideout.

Can he find the Cardinals before it is too late and the Illuminati destroy the Vatican with a newly discovered anti-matter?

Anti-Matter?

Seriously?

When did this become Star Trek?

Director Ron Howard must have been paying attention and furiously taking notes when he saw National Treasure because all you have to do is plug in Nicolas Cage (a man who knows something about goofy hairdos) and this could have been National Treasure 3. Writers Akiva Goldsmith and David Koepp (based on the novel by Dan Brown) kinda don’t matter, since Angels & Demons is a movie in constant motion with almost no mystery whatsoever.

Some movies allow the audience to play along with the mystery and give us a chance to solve it with our hero, but, much like the National Treasure movies, Langdon seems to come up with answers out of nowhere, while he instantly interprets clues that keep popping up with more frequency than baseball players getting caught using steroids. It’s not a mystery that develops and builds with each clue. We just bounce from place to place.

Howard isn’t interested in exploring any of the characters, deeper motivations or enamoring the audience with nuanced subtleties. Professor Langdon needs to run! Run fast! Run here! Run there! Run over there, again! In that sense, Angels & Demons is a movie that tosses you into the middle of it all, and keeps the action rocking and rolling, until about twenty minutes before the very end.

Sadly, that’s where Angels & Demons loses me. After such a fast paced, action packed beginning and middle, Howard and the gang draw out the ending about 20 minutes longer than needed. I never read the book, so I am not sure if that was the original ending from Brown, but Howard needs to make it more compact, or give us a better ending even if it sends The Da Vinci Code faithful into full protest and angry email writing mode. Instead, the audience is taken through a final few scenes that slog along in complete contrast to the pace established early on.

Angels & Demons isn’t the hellishly boring experience The Da Vinci Code was, but no one will be granted Hollywood sainthood for this one.

Angels & Demons is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence, disturbing images and thematic material.