DVD Reviews

Angels And Demons

• Rating:
• Director: Ron Howard
• Starring: Ewan McGregor
• Details: US / 138mins (12A).

After calling the adaptation of The Da Vinci Code 'hooey', Tom Hanks teams up once again with Ron Howard for the follow up Angels and Demons. Fans of the book can rest easy as this instalment hangs together better as a movie than its precursor; that is until things get silly, then ridiculous and then, just before the climax, downright absurd.
Hanks returns as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon who is jetted off to the Vatican to solve the mystery of four kidnapped cardinals, all of which are in the running to become the next Pope and all of which will be publicly executed on the hour, every hour, until the bell tolls at midnight. Not only that, but a bomb of anti-matter has been stolen and will explode at the same time, destroying the city. Theories abound as to who is behind it and clues give the nod to The Illuminati, a secret society dedicated to science and determined to take revenge on the church for its persecution of its members centuries before. Helping Langdon solve the clues are physicist and eye candy Vittoria Vetra (Zurer) and Camerlengo Patrick McKenna (McGregor), a young Vatican priest in charge while the cardinals are in conclave voting on the next Pope, but time is running out...
For the first hour-and-a-half, Angels And Demons rights the wrongs that damned The Da Vinci Code. Gone are the heavy exposition scenes, where everything slowed down to tell the audience what is going on (and then stalled completely to make sure everyone 'got' it). Gone too are the dodgy 'Get me to a library. Fast!' lines. Unburdened by its heavy plot of searching for Jesus's ancestor for a more streamlined 'believable' thriller, this sequel moves more freely and seems to enjoy itself. It can be also quite gruesome with the Illuminati's assassin indulging in Se7en-like executions. The performances are somewhat better, too. All of this is good.
But now the bad. Forgetting that one man could not perform such elaborate executions in under an hour in various parts of the city and in full view of everyone; Angels And Demons pushes the suspension of disbelief too far for anyone to stay on board with. It's the last half hour, though, that really makes a mockery of the story and the audience's intelligence. The film falls on its arse and shatters into a thousand pieces with increasingly improbable twists. It's a tad easier, too, to figure out who is behind it all because Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp's script devotes too much screen time to minor characters earlier on, so much so that everyone knows they'll have a part to play once the twists get underway. And what kind of assassin lays clues that draw the authorities in? Isn't that just making things unnecessarily hard?

Review by Gavin Burke