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Angels & Demons

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Cert: 12A

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Dir: Ron Howard. Cast: Tom Hanks, Ayelet Zurer, Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgard, Pierfrancesco Favino, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Nikolaj Lie Kaas

 

Description: When a respected nuclear research scientist is found dead in his secure laboratory, his chest branded with a strange symbol, Harvard professor Robert Langdon is summoned to investigate. He links the symbol to a secret society called the Illuminati, which was thought to have died out centuries ago. In a chilling twist, the dead scientist's colleague Vittoria reveals that the killer stole a canister full of antimatter, which could be primed to explode in the Vatican City, causing similar devastation to a nuclear bomb. Robert and Vittoria race to the holy city where the Pope has recently died and four cardinals are standing for election. The Camerlengo willingly pledges his support to Robert to track down the cardinals, who are all missing, and the elusive canister.

Country: US. 2009. 138mins

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Not enough guilty pleasures in Angels & Demons

 

Saving grace: Ewan McGregor raises the stakes as the Pope’s secretary undergoing a crisis of belief

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THE sad fact about corruption is that it is usually quite mundane — a pile of manure here, a packet of HobNobs there, claimed on expenses by politicians too jaded to observe their own codes of decency. In that sense I think we should thank the author Dan Brown for making corruption a little more thrilling. Instead of powerful men and women nicking the price of a roll of wallpaper off the taxpayer, Brown presents us with much livelier gargoyles, religious fanatics who run around the major cities of Europe murdering people and feeling very hyped-up about medieval rumours, the sort that nobody can pronounce, never mind understand.

It has always appealed to the faithful — as well as to faithful readers and faithful film-goers — that the Church is now and then home to fanatics willing to do evil things in the pursuit of goodness. Dan Brown made hay on the subject, mixing it with a whole lot of historical junk and mystical hokum, and his books have so far satisfied 40 million readers (or puzzle fans) looking to spice up their train journeys with a harmless spot of portentous rubbish.

The movie of The Da Vinci Code went on to make $750 million, proof, if any were needed in these high times and holidays, that nobody ever got poor underestimating the taste of an amusement-hungry public. The film was daft, but it was daft in a fairly captivating way, with Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), and his angelic sidekick (Audrey Tautou), rushing in and out of ancient churches carrying a fancy Rubik’s Cube. “We’ve been dragged into a world of people who think this stuff is real,” says Hanks in that movie. And so we had: that is the chief trick of Dan Brown and director Ron Howard. If you spend enough time hanging around with guys like these you find you want to believe anything.

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Yet even among those most agreeable to being duped, Angels & Demons, the latest film from the gullible-dependent firm of Brown and Howard, might present some pretty insurmountable challenges. As the story begins the Vatican is making ready to elect a new Pope. A 400-year-old secret group, the Illuminati, kidnap the four leading contenders for the papacy and threaten to put them to death in Roman locations described by a complicated sequence. Meanwhile, a canister of anti-matter that has been produced at a nuclear research facility in Switzerland is stolen by the Illuminati, who say they will use it to destroy Vatican City. At this point, trusty old Professor Langdon swoops in from Harvard. You’ll find that everything swoops in a Ron Howard film: you swing from bird’s-eye view to close-up in a kind of constant, ravenous diving motion, the like of which hasn’t been seen since the epic films of David Lean, which look static by comparison.
Langdon’s mental brilliance is concealed for me by Tom Hanks’s very natural embarrassing dad-ness. He always looks like the wacky, long-suffering, normal guy, so it’s a stretch to believe in him as a mad professor. When we should be strangely interested in Langdon’s spiritual gobbledegook about ancient metaphysics, we in fact want to laugh our heads off in anticipation of a Gumpish payoff that never comes.

These books and films are now a franchise and Ron Howard is just the man to honour it with a ready-made formula. In this way, the Brown-Howard films are coming to look like James Bond films, only with copious incense and dusty parchments in place of martinis and Aston Martins. A film like this can be more or less faxed to the studio. The Illuminati are facsimiles of the Knights Templar in the previous movie, religious fanatics who believe true Christianity is under attack. And Rome in this movie is a facsimile of Paris in the last one, a place of art palaces and libraries, big fireplaces and secret rooms.

A formula always requires a girl and here Ayelet Zurer plays the slightly brainy sidekick Vittoria Vetra, who represents the crudities of science as they go to war with the crudities of belief.

Running alongside all this, sometimes at a snail’s pace in terms of the meandering plot, are various bent coppers and questionable clergymen, the kind of people you wouldn’t buy a used crucifix off even if you were the last convert in hell.

The film’s saving grace, though unfortunately he cannot be its saviour, is Ewan McGregor, who plays the part of the dead pope’s secretary, the Carmerlengo, traditionally the Vatican City’s head of state while it waits for a new pope to be elected. The Harvard professor tries to make an ally of him in his attempt to break the iron tradition of the Church, which appears not to take the threats of assassinations or bombing seriously enough. A great deal of fiery, animated action and chasing goes into this, but each time we see McGregor’s character he seems wrapped in a very human crisis of belief, as well as some personal agony about what to do next. This is acting, and to find it in a movie so jammed with blinking gizmos is a genuine treat. Bad films often go ludicrous and nasty at the same point, and that’s what happens here, as an over-excited study of Vatican politics finally blows its top in a frenzy of savage plot twists and stunts. I’m not sure what it’s like on the way to heaven or hell but surely it can’t always be this noisy.

Of course, this is big-budget territory, and the gizmos will always win in the end. Sometimes that is very good news for moviegoers, but this week, with Angels & Demons, the fantastic ongoing saga of Brownism might make us feel short of breath in the company of something that is beyond belief. That’s Dan Brown I’m talking about.

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