Angels and Demons

Angels and Demons

Dir. Ron Howard

138 mins

Cert. 12a

2009

Robert Langdon wears a Mickey Mouse watch. It’s clearly intended to imply that the hero of Angels and Demons has a personality. He’s a symbologist from Harvard, but he’s a fun guy. The kind of guy around whom you’d base a movie franchise.

Nope.

Robert Langdon is not a fun guy.

Angels and Demons, besides being crippled by a rambling and threadbare narrative, just doesn’t stand a chance with this tedious little dork at the wheel. The script is an ungodly miracle, making Tom Hanks into a pompous smart-ass with no endearing qualities aside from his ability to solve mysteries that wouldn’t stump Columbo.

The Pope is dead, and the Cardinals up for his job have been kidnapped. Hiding four old men in hot pink dresses and giant hats is no easy task, but a shadowy group claiming to be an ancient enemy of the church claims responsibility. Worse still, the same group has stolen a molecule of antimatter (the same stuff that powers the starship Enterprise). The Vatican recruits Langdon to track down the Cardinals and the antimatter before it blows Rome to kingdom come. This would be a real shame, since the amazingly convincing Vatican sets are the high point of the movie and the closest most of us will ever come to seeing inside.

Luckily for Langdon, the villain likes to send the authorities facile clues hinting at his next move (he likes anagrams, and provides a live video feed of the bomb for some reason). Langdon’s role is simply to narrow his eyes and figure out the clues. Cinema was not invented so that we could watch some charmless know-it-all standing around and thinking deeply about glorified crossword puzzles. For one thing, all the exposition is carried by Langdon’s smug dialogue with the supporting cast (does the Academy give out Oscars for patience?). There’s just nothing else in the film to communicate the riddles that make up the bulk of the story. He’s often left describing the intricacies of this wacky conspiracy to people who, in the real world, would surely look around awkwardly and quietly start dialling the cops.

The supporting cast has very little to do, since Hanks plays the guy with all the answers. Ewan McGregor, a little weird as the late Pope’s adopted son, does his best to breathe a little life into the film, with limited success. Ayelet Zurer, as nuclear physicist Vittoria Vetra, is present solely to tease more exposition from Langdon. In a failed effort to correct the mistakes of The Da Vinci Code, the talking is broken up with some ham-fisted chase sequences and a couple of hackneyed set pieces, but it’s like putting an ice pack on a severed leg. The soundtrack is thunderous and grandiose, but only succeeds in highlighting how wearisome the ‘action’ is. The climax is pretty loopy, and a disappointing reward for sitting through Langdon’s drivel.

Robert Langdon wears a Mickey Mouse watch. This is supposed to imply that he’s a fun guy. Instead he comes across as the most insufferable kind of bore. The kind that thinks he’s a fun guy. And that’s Angels and Demons.

5/10

-James