Predictable, edgeless

Rating: 6/10 (6 June 2009)

Ron Howard’s followup to The Da Vinci Code is an easy-to-follow, paint-by-numbers mystery thriller that probably would have received little recognition had it a) not been directed by Howard, b) not starred the redoubtable Tom Hanks, and c) used religion as its theme. All three elements contribute to form an overblown, frantic mess that offers little mystery.
Robert Langdon (Hanks), the “symbologist” (not a real position) of The Da Vinci Code, is again the hero here, called into action by the Vatican itself, as four of its esteemed cardinals have been, um, cardinalnapped, just as an Conclave to choose the new Pope is about to begin. At the same time, an experiment at Switzerland’s CERN research center has produced a nifty new substance called antimatter - and it’s been stolen! By, it appears, whoever kidnapped the cardinal. The antimatter’s storage container must be found before midnight, or else the battery will run out, and everyone will be doomed.
So it’s a race against the clock as Langdon and a beautiful CERN scientist (Ayelet Zurer) try to locate the container and save the cardinals. The mismatched duo - will they fall in love? - must match wits with some unseen wacko religious extremist, as well as the head of the Swiss Guard (Stellan Skarsgard). They’re helped by the youthful Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor), i.e., the Pope’s Helper fellow, and the chief of Vatican City’s police force (Pierfrancisco Favino) - or are they? The bad guy could be a good guy in disguise, right? Or did I just blow your mind? One thing that did bother me a lot about this movie - aside from the faceless, let’s-run-from-clue-to-clue plot device - is that for a movie that’s supposed to be peopled with Serious Folks who revere Important Things, sort of like Indiana Jones and his “it belongs in a museum!” mantra, there’s a LOT of desecration of religious artifacts, often for no good reason at all. Example: Langdon and his gal pal get access to the Vatican’s archives (of course they do) to look at one of Galileo’s original texts. The only one remaining in existence, right? In lieu of translating, they just rip a page out. Much light is made of the mysterious archives, and although I’m not remotely religious, this struck me as particularly disrespectful. Was Howard lampooning the Church, or was he trying to tell a good mystery tale? He succeeded only in doing the former, which is a huge disappointment.
Hanks isn’t bad - better than he was in The Da Vinci Code, anyway - and his hair is less distracting here. He’s every bit as intrepid as you’d expect a Harvard professor to be in investigating a murder, which I’m sure is something that happens all the time to Harvard professors. Probably more than for Yale professors, anyway. So he’s not the problem, or even a problem. An issue, though, is that the characters are so thinly drawn. I mean, when you see two characters who seem a little dodgy, you know one of them will turn out to be not so dodgy, and maybe even a Good Guy after all. “Twists” like that can be spotted too far in advance for my tastes.
If you took the core plot of “24″ and stripped away most of the tension and all of the character depth and added sacrilege, you’d get Angels and Demons. The book, as they say, is a heck of a lot better than the vapid movie version, but you probably assumed that anyway. What you might not have realized is that although this book was a lot better than the Da Vinci Code book, the movie is only marginally better than the DVC on film.