Board game

Rating: Null/10 (14 May 2009)

Quite a few action flicks have been compared to video games, with good reasons. But some may remember that before electronic game proliferate the world of entertainment, there was a time, starting in the 1960s, when Monopoly lead the proliferation of board games which came in all varieties imaginable (sleuth, adventure, finance, war, even journalism!). "Angels and demons" is the nearest a movie can ever come to resemble a board game. The map of Vatican and Rome is the colourful playing board and the characters the playing pieces. There are clue cards and movement rules and an invisible hand that tosses the dices.
Rules of a board came cannot be overly complicated or they'll spoil the fun. Similarly, A&D is far less complicated compared with Da Vinci Code. The plot surrounds the re-surfacing of a medieval secret society, the Illuminati, scientists persecuted mercilessly by the Catholic Church. In the wake of the demise of the current Pope, the Illuminati comes back with full poetic-justice style vengeance, kidnapping the 4 most likely successors and vowing to kill one every hour, before branding them just as 4 of the scientists were branded and killed a few centuries ago. The culmination will be a total annihilation of Vatican at midnight, using an unimaginably powerful destructive tool, a cutting edge device of nuclear physics that they stole. So this is not only a board game, but one with a playing time limit. The hero engaged by the authorities to unravel the mysterious clues in order to save the kidnapped cardinals and avert disaster is Harvard professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), an expert on the Illuminati. Fun and games.
Playing this game with energetic enthusiasm is a great cast of class-A actors. Hanks, who doesn't need another Oscar and not exactly shooting for one with this movie, plays along with good humour. Ewan McGregor, generally recognized as a capable actor even without any major awards to his name, plays Camerlengo Patrick McKenna, "acting Pope" until the new one is elected. Versatile veteran Stellan Skarsgard, seen recently in "Mama Mia" (2008) alongside with Collin Firth and Pierce Brosnan, plays the intimidating commander of the Swiss Guards in charge of Vatican's security. Not to be missed is Armin Mueller-Stahl (playing Cardinal Strauss), a truly formidable actor who just about stole the show in "Eastern Promises" (2007). Very nice to watch is Israelite beauty Ayelet Zurer playing the scientist working alongside Professor Langdon trying to recover her lost lethal explosive device.
While I can understand the Catholic community's protest, there is a certain degree of lure in melodramatic mysteries involving the Catholic Church. Dan Brown gains his popularity primarily through his crafty manipulation of clues and hooks. However, the best mystery novel based on the Catholic Church is a best seller by Canadian Charles Templeton (evangelist, broadcaster, author, journalistamong other things), "Act of God" (1977). The setting is very similar to A&D in that one of the plot lines is the election of a new Pope. The ingenuity of AOG is in the other plot line, an eccentric archaeologist's discovery at the Dead Sea of skeletal remains that he can prove to be Jesus Christ's. The terrifying implication is only too clear to his good friend, a Cardinal in New York who is among the top candidates for the next Pope: while educated Catholics who can accept a degree of symbolism in the Bible and cope with this discovery, a large population with minimum education will have their fundamental faith in the resurrection shattered. From there on, it's an agonizing psychological struggle in the Cardinal, as murder is contemplated. "Act of God" offers considerably more insight and depth than Dan Brown's mass-pleasing A&D, and I hope someone will make it into a movie. (Templeton's one other book. "Kidnapping of a president" has been made into a movie).