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

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Review: X-men origins: Wolverine

Dir: Gavin Hood

Cert. 12a

107mins

2009

Like its titular cigar-chomping hero, Wolverine is short, violent and ugly.

And did I mention stupid?

My goodness, Wolverine is stupid. Played with unnerving enthusiasm by Hugh Jackman, Wolverine is a bloodthirsty amnesiac with a history that is considered convoluted even by comic book standards (this is, remember, a universe in which the past is regularly rewritten in order to explain away glaring inconsistencies). He's a lame and generic anti-hero. The film is just as confused and equally berserk.

The film is a misguided effort to colour in Wolverine’s mysterious past and explain how he came to be the metal-boned badass who rose to dominate the X-men comics. X-men, long before Jackman played Wolverine in all three of the largely decent movies, started life as an allegory for racial tolerance in the middle of the Civil Rights movement. Wolverine on the other hand is cool because he drinks, smokes and kills people.

Wolverine is based on ludicrous plot contrivances, inexplicable character motivations and the notion that overblown action sequences will make up for the fact that the film just doesn’t make sense. Jackman careers wildly through his scenes, but the film’s heavy-handedness robs Wolverine of the already flimsy moral ambiguity that made him popular in the first place. The nastiest thing this Wolverine does is smoking in public. The supporting cast is made up of disposable cameos by B-list comic book characters who add almost nothing to the narrative, which blasts cheerfully along never bothering to explain why anybody does anything. Wolverine’s half-brother ‘Sabretooth’ (Liev Schreiber, trying hard to carry off a little dignity), is a woefully ill-conceived nemesis who scampers around on all fours like a bearded cat in an overcoat. Sabretooth spends the movie tempting Wolverine to abandon his heroic ways and join him for some mildly homo-erotic bloodlust, but once again the film’s overwhelming stupidity wastes this opportunity. Sabretooth is no more than a two dimensional villain, and Wolverine is never realistically tempted to do anything worse than strike a dramatic pose.

I’ve long held the belief that the majority of comic books are just soap-operas in spandex, and Wolverine plays out like a superpowered episode of Days of Our Lives. Ridiculous bouts of plot-enhancing amnesia? Check. Characters arbitrarily returning from the grave? Check. Big hair? Check. It feels cheap and desperate, and this is compounded by surprisingly lacklustre and inconsistent special effects. In addition, the 12a rating means that every fit of ‘berserker’ violence is completely bloodless.

My goodness, Wolverine is stupid.

4/10

-James

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