Angels and Demons and Paratrooper Priests and Antimatter Bombs and Catholic Shame…
Since I’m not actually reviewing Ron Howard’s The DaVinci Code here I can freely admit that I caught it on cable and wandered aimlessly from it. It just never hooked me enough to keep from making multiple trips to the bathroom, kitchen, liquor store, whatever. With Angels and Demons, it seemed to have all the elements that turned me off of that film souped up on steroids. However, about 45 minutes or so into this 2 hour and 20 minute epic journey from common sense I was beaten into submission by the charm of Tom Hanks and the medicine ball sized-testicles of screenwriters David Koepp and friends who I can only guess smoked large quantities of controlled substances while pounding out this thing.
I really tried to take this film seriously for a while, but I finally realized that if I was going to be able to tolerate this rather long flick that I had no choice but to completely turn off all sections of my brain that controlled any sense of reality, believability and plausibility. While the previews are selling this thing as a sort of a Vatican Murder Mystery, let me give the real plot summary without trying to spoil it for you.
Angels and Demons, the tale of a plot against the Vatican and the Catholic Church opens at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern during a daring and dangerous attempt to create quantities of anti-matter. Now, I’m a huge fan of science, skepticism, and the LHC, and I have no idea how plausible this is, but to my mildly trained mind it seems outrageous. During the entire opening sequence I was asking myself if I was in the right film. Was this a joke? After miraculously creating three chunks of anti-matter that were instantaneously deposited in to ready-to-serve airline carry-on sized containers, one of them is stolen by a man that seemed to be able to roam freely around the LHC facility on the authority of his janitorial uniform. Of course he had to pluck out the eye of one of the physicists (who also happened to be an ordained Catholic Priest) to pass a retinal scanner to get into the “anti-matter holding area” or whatever the hell it was.
Cut to the chase, it appears that the antimatter theft was a plot by the ancient society called the Illuminati who have secretly been at war with the Catholic Church remaining silent for the last 400 years waiting for the exact right moment to strike back at the Vatican. Low and behold, now is the time, and they begin their revenge plot by kidnapping the four Cardinals who are the front runners to be confirmed to replace the recently dead Pope and threatening to execute them one by one every hour on the day of the conclave to determine the successor culminating with them blowing up the Vatican with anti-matter at midnight.
Now enter the young Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor), the advisor and secretly legally adopted son of the recently deceased Pope who also happens to be a trained military pilot and paratrooper (the Camerlengo, not the dead Pope). In a desperate attempt to stop this plot, the Vatican flies in Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and one of the Cern LHC Physicists (Ayelet Zuror) to try to decipher the Illuminati’s complex trail of clues to the bomb, save the kidnapped Cardinals and diffuse the antimatter bomb before midnight. Of course, after the events of The DaVinci Code, the Vatican is still considerably pissy with Langdon and had been continually denying his requests for access to the Vatican Archives so he could finish his second book on the Illuminati.
Now don’t get lost, if this all sounds a bit silly and farfetched, the summary is nothing compared to how it plays on screen just getting more and more unbelievable as the minutes tick by.
However, I’m going to fight against my best judgment and admit here and now that after I gave up fighting the silliness I ended up enjoying Angels and Demons. Ron Howard attacks this subject matter unapologetically and with utter glee and delivers a pretty cracking and fast paced little murder mystery. Thrown into this mix is the deadly serious performance of Tom Hanks and the solid work from Ewan McGregor and they manage to glue this thing together just tight enough to keep it from flying apart at high speeds. And I’m embarrassed to say that it ends up working pretty well.
If you can give about half your brain to the ticket taker to hold for you while watch the flick and buy into the entire complex mishmash of physics, religion, symbols and theological terrorists who brashly develop plots that can be untangled by college professors combing through 400 year old pamphlets and follow old classic sculptures around Italy to see which way their fingers are pointing to get to the next step in the mystery train then you have a good chance of walking out satisfied. I did. If there’s any comparison to be made here it’s very reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in story and structure, right down to the why and how of decoding ancient clues and finding hidden passages.
The film is expertly paced, systematically entertaining, well constructed all while being completely out to lunch from a common sense standpoint. I really don’t know if I can or should give this any kind of “official” recommendation, but if you just want to be pummeled about the head and neck area for a couple of hours with fun and silliness then this film works. The thing that makes this hard to swallow is that this inherent silliness is wrapped up in the guise of several seemingly important and timely subjects like the power and mistakes of the Catholic Church and the ongoing debate of religion vs. science. But you do have to give it credit for interspersing these heavy topics with no less than 5 human hot iron brandings, half a dozen shootings and and 2 people being burned alive.
However, all these rather deep and hotly debated topics are simply trivialized and bitch-slapped by an entertaining run around that probably would have been just as believable had it been Fred, Velma, Scooby, Shaggy and Daphne following these clues around the Vatican rather than Tom Hanks and a hot young female physicist.
Either way, I can’t predict the academy tripping over itself to put this up for any best adapted screenplay awards next year, but you could do worse than spending a couple of hours with Angels and Demons. Hopefully, I’ve given you enough information in this brief review for you to be able to decide whether you can actually stomach the treatment of the subject matter at hand.
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