I gave up after about one hour. Not for me I'm afraid.

Rating: 3/10 (3 May 2016)

Following a friend's recommendation, I started to watch 'Angels and Demons', directed by Ton Howard and starring Tom Hanks with really knowing what it was all about.
As soon as the movie started, I realised I had made a mistake.
I am not totally against 'action movies' or indeed any decent suspense or clever mystery yarn with 'baddies' and 'goodies', but it has to be really good – an Oscar winner, or close to.
By way of example, a recent action movie that I thoroughly enjoyed was 'The Town': a bank heist, cops and robbers pic set in Boston and it was one of the best in that genre that I have ever seen. There was plenty of drama, action, suspense, and real people with real dramatic lives, to the extent that you actually believed in them and cared about what happened to them. But in the main, most of the formula-ridden junk that the film studios churn out these days leaves me absolutely cold.
I read Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, as it was a world-wide phenomenon, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Well, it was a clever romp with some genuinely suspenseful and exciting story lines. I know I am being elitist, but I thought the quality of the writing was pretty ordinary, to say the least. However I was sufficiently interested to view the hyped up movie of the same name, but frankly, I couldn't even make it to the halfway stage. To me, it was totally boring garbage.
And now, inadvertently, I was watching a Dan Brown 'sequel', complete with Tom Hanks performing a reprise role. I decided to give it a chance and watch it for a while, for something in the back of my mind reminded me that this movie was reckoned to be a much better film than the Da Vinci Code.
It was a certainly a well-produced flick, and the 'no expense spared' production values oozed out of every inch of footage. The actors, including Hanks, were doing their best, but frankly it became very tedious. There was no chemistry between the two leading stars and there were lots of stereotypical, creepy Cardinals and other nasty Italian priests playing all the bit parts. The plot might have been fascinating in print, but to this reviewer, it was a piece of boring nonsense and the behaviour of the leading participants didn't contain one iota of credibility.
The story involves a sinister, murdering group of scientists, whose ancestors went underground in the middle ages to protect them from persecution by the catholic church. Then these evil men, who kidnap and kill 4 cardinals and then blow up Vatican city with a piece of stolen anti-matter was, to say the least a bit far-fetched. But in this day and age, it was just another variation on a totally unoriginal theme. I am okay-ish with unbelievable plots – even way out science fiction plots - but the characters must always behave in a convincing and credible manner. In this movie, as in so many of a similar ilk, they simply don't. There was no way to relate to them as being believable, real people - they are just comic-book, cardboard cut-out dummies, with their strings being pulled by avaricious studio producers.
I gave up after about one hour. Not for me I'm afraid.