|
 In cinemas now [M]
Director: Ron Howard
Runtime: 138mins
When it comes to respected Harvard professor, Robert Langdon, I’m afraid I have to sympathise with the head of the Vatican Swiss Guard, Commander Richter (Stellen Skarsgård), who finds the symbologist an insufferable bore. Tom Hanks’s Langdon is the kind of prat who would prompt less tolerant types to punch him on the nose. And I’m sure I detected a slight flinch on one of the Roman detectives faces as Langdon’s entourage sweep through the Vatican, and the professor has yet another bout of verbal diarrhea explaining the presence of fig leaves on all of the statues of naked men. I think I’d feel like punching this feller on the nose within minutes of meeting him.
Against Richter’s better judgment, Langdon has been called in to assist in the Vatican’s investigation of a kidnapping that has jeopardised the recently convened Conclave – the election process enacted on the death of a pope. What the broader public does not know is that a group claiming to be the Illuminati – a group of science-loving Catholics once completely purged by the Church – has kidnapped the four preferiti, the late-Pope’s favoured Cardinals, who stand the highest chance of being elected in his place.
Of course, Langdon – whose adventures in the turgid The Da Vinci Code have not exactly enamoured himself with the Catholics – is a little bemused by his new role, but rises to the challenge set by the Illuminati: shut down the Conclave, or the Vatican will be destroyed by an antimatter bomb that has been snaffled from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Yes, it may sound convoluted, which is exactly what Dan Brown – the new millenium’s patron to literature – wants us to think.
Angels And Demons is really just a rather pedestrian race-against-time wrapped up in pseudo-conspiracy babble. It’s painfully obvious that the next Dan Brown Reality Tour – with prattling, camera-clad American tourists, paperback in hand – will take in Illuminati sites across Rome and the Vatican. After all, that’s what Langdon and his pretty, but hopelessly hapless sidekick Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) are up against as the clock ticks towards midnight, and the preferiti drop one by one.
Director Ron Howard was refused access to the Vatican, and apparently chose to build a scale model of St Peter’s Square. The result is a symptomatic of the film itself: overhyped and undercooked. Will it make a fortune? Of course – this is a Dan Brown film after all.
***
TIM MILFULL
|
| Comments are submitted for possible publication on the condition that they may be edited. Poster's IP addresses are logged. |
|
Be first to comment on this article
