Parachuting Priests....er....

Rating: 4/10 (18 May 2009)

I quite enjoyed the Da Vinci Code so I should preface this by saying I thought this was most definitely inferior to its predecessor.
Ultimately it was a decent thriller, blighted by a few fairly major problems.
Firstly the opening 30mins of the film involved far too much chasing round involving mutterings about various symbols. There was a lot of muttering about symbols and uninteresting historical figures. I love History myself but I found this all very uninvolving. Too much focus on a car skidding round with dramatic music and not enough focus on actual context.
The film did begin to pick up as time went along, although not by much. Unfortunately I had guessed from the beginning that Ewan Ms character was going to turn out to be the bad guy. It was something about the way he was being acted and a few key things he said. The scene when the guards run in and shoot his would be attackers was fairly implausible and the moment Ewan said 'he is the one' just before the guy got shot kind of confirmed my suspicion that he was indeed the bad guy.
But wait...what is this....they find the bomb and then Ewans character grabs the bomb jumps in a helicopter and then parachutes out of it leaving the bomb to explode 10000feet up in the sky. Ey? I was thinking, maybe I'm wrong, maybe he isn't the bad guy...I mean what kind of insane bad guy sets up a plot whereby he has to fly a helicopter into the sky with a bomb on board and parachute out with about 10seconds to go. That would be quite a risk for a bad guy to take, presumably he must have organised the chopper and the parachute...
So I am thinking this movie is terrible if these are genuine heroics...a priest parachuting out of a chopper after flying it into the sky...seriously...it was just a little hard to swallow.
However it quickly became clear thanks to a recording of the Papal offices that he was indeed the bad guy and just previous to the chopper flying he had branded himself with a red hot metal branding stick and faked the whole assault from the perceived bad guy.
So...he was the bad guy behind it all and that helicopter thing was an elaborate plot he had setup to secure his place as the pope afterwards. BIT OF A GAMBLE...you might say...I mean not only the whole plot which was absurd in the first place with the bomb and the chopper etc etc...gambling that the two people who could have revealed his plot would be shot dead when they were discovered near him when he was branded...but to gamble that the conclave would then elect him pope for the whole chopper thing...I mean that is quite a plan...ambitious doesn't really say it does it...
Anyhow there are many other implausible aspects to this movie which I won't complain about, It is not that I have a problem with implausibility in film...it is just that this film stretched it to the absolute limit...a lot of things made very little sense at all and the film was quite uninvolving for large periods.
My advice is in future they slow the whole thing down, stop with the cars driving fast and the music and the largely uninteresting mutterings, give us some real depth of history and make the story at least mildly plausible.
Note to the director - If you find yourself making a movie where a priest who is currently the acting head of the Catholic church parachutes from a Helicopter which has an antimatter bomb in it...just stop...stop what you are doing and rethink the whole thing...you have gone wrong somewhere...