at parity with 'The Code'

Rating: 6/10 (21 May 2010)

I belong to a small and well-famed minority. I like Dan Brown's novels and I declare it openly. Yes, I came out of the closet as they say. I liked 'The Da Vinci Code' book (not so much the film) and I said it. I was immediately buried under tons of sarcasm, irony, pity. What can I do? Historical mysteries are one of my preferred genres since I read Jules Verne's books or Constantin Chirita's 'Ciresarii' (Romanian speakers may know what I am talking about).
'Angels & Demons' the book was written before 'The Code', but the movie comes after, so there is no need to explain too much about the expertise of professor Langdon (Tom Hanks) or why he is called to solve historical mysteries with religious symbols implications. It's good that it's so, because the last thing the script in this film has is credibility. Yes, I enjoy historical riddles, but they need some plausible justification to be inserted in the script, and this justification lacks here completely. Luckily I buy easily the conventions of such movies, so I sat back in my chair and enjoyed the action, which is a combination between James Bond and '24' with Rome and papal intrigues replacing Los Angeles (or New York in the last '24' season) and the US presidency, but with corpses popping up each round hour. Moreover, seeing again the beautiful setting of the streets of Rome one and a half month after my last days of vacation there was also cool.
This certainly does not make enough for a great film, or even for a great action film. My main problem with Ron Howard's 'Code' was the fact that he turned the great actors that are Hanks and Tautou unto just good but not very interesting actors. Here Hanks still looks at least as amazed to be in this movie as his character is to be in the middle of all this action, while his partner is now the Israeli actress Ayelet Zorer, which I respect very much for other roles, and I am happy that she got such an opportunity to play with Hanks in a blockbuster but I do not think that they let her use it too well. Maybe in the next film in the series Hanks will be more lucky with a partner to be of interest to him :-) Overall, not a bad action film, not the best either, at parity with 'The Code'.