Silly and boring

Rating: 6/10 (27 June 2020)

Angels and Demons starts off with the pope dying and the Vatican looking for his replacement. However, the four frontrunner cardinals for the pope and a vial of antimatter get stolen (all by one super-soldier guy) and it's up to "symbologist" Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), sidekick physicist Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) to figure out who the kidnapper/thief is.
They don't have much time as one cardinal will be killed per hour and at midnight, the antimatter vial will break from it's magnetic container and cause a huge explosion. And, of course all the police are effectively useless and it's up to Langdon and sidekick Vetra to figure it all out.
The movie follows that formula: Langdon figures out the first location, some action scenes and "time is running out" suspense. Then another, then another. The problem is, it's so compacted that you're just hopping from one epiphany to the next. It's almost like the hold Batman and Robin tv shows where Batman is given a crazy clue from the riddler, thinks about it, then comes up with the solution after a few seconds. After doing this so many times in this movie, it becomes silly.
What's also silly is the plot. So the pope's son Camerlengo Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor) is the ultimate villain, wanting to gain the papacy as he believes the church is getting to chummy with science. So he concocts a plan to get a guy to steal the 4 cardinals, a vial of antimatter, send Langdon and team on a wild goose chase only to save the antimatter vial just in time for it to just about explode and the only option is for McKenna to single handedly take it in a helicopter, sacrificing his life, but jumping from a parachute at the last moment. The conclave, seeing an apparent miracle, decide he should be the next pope. That's some Rube Goldberg type planning.
I did enjoy The Da Vinci code much more. It's been a while, but I do remember it had much of the same thing, but not as condensed. This was a case of too much of a good thing + too crazy of a plan and it just ended up as a boring, silly, mess of a movie. That said, the twist with McKenna did surprise me. Sure, I had thoughts he was the villain, but I didn't *know*. That alone bumped this from a 5 to a 6.