The Busy Baddie and the Atheist Fantasy Hero

Rating: Null/10 (18 May 2009)

Faith is a gift he is "yet to receive." But Professor Robert Langdon has done instead is merely knelt before the Magdalene and and ridden a car backwards at high speed under someone's the Jedi reflexes. Like Professor Indiana Jones, he can wave the flag of the scientist no matter what plot machinations demonstrate before his own eyes. And the audience can disbelieve right along with him.
One of the best story devices here is that the Vatican security office receives a live camera feed showing an anti-matter bomb that has "artificial light" on it so to find its location throughout the movie they shut down power to each section of Vatican City, one by one. What's not determined is whether the artificial light is A/C or D/C like the explosive device itself running out of battery power, nor how long the power needs to be turned off in each case before it can be seen on the security monitor (long enough to hold one's breath?), nor who remains in the security office to observe this, nor how they plan to view the monitor should they get around to switching off the power to the security office.
Meanwhile the mastermind behind this multi-layered crime had made great leaps of faith. Of COURSE you can find a trustworthy thug to transport an unstable experimental substance (which will not exist until moments before its theft) across the world and then stand on it patiently. Of COURSE even though you are using the real anti-matter bomb and have placed it where it can destroy something that you want, you have calculated the correct influence of cold on battery power and you know within a second when it will die and how far away it must be to survive a matter-anti-matter contact explosion. Of COURSE you can invite an academic into a crisis that threatens tourists of Rome and expect that he will respect the Vatican's decision to keep Roman police out of it for fear of "world media attention." Of COURSE he will wade through the seemingly doomed crowds with full knowledge of a time-bomb and simply tell no secular cops because he's just that kind of respectful guy. Of COURSE it is also quite worthwhile to arrange your set-piece killings according to a puzzle with clues any whip-smart symbologist can follow in time to help facilitate and witness your grand finale. And of COURSE it is worth killing the highest-ranking priests you can find when the afterlife and judgment are uppermost in your psyche.
They say an adventure is only as good as the villain's plan. In this case it is full of more holes than Swiss Cheese on the CERN lunch cart. I admit while reading both Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code I was turning the pages and feelin' smart since I knew and still know nothing about the Illuminati or secret societies and those books might either be a primer for a lot of us or the whole nut of our education on these matters. In book form, it was interesting as it unfolded. I fumed a bit about this or that, questioned some as a weather-beaten Catholic myself, but overall enjoyed the way plot points revealed themselves. I admit that the adaptation for the most part has likely made wise choices in omissions. One critic cited Langdon's joke from the book, "Neutrinos have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic." But that glibness couldn't just be dropped into the life-and-death scenes that survive. Sometimes the time it takes to read a page rounds out an unlikely event that would be tough to take on screen. So I can't fault the adaptation and Ron Howard made as good a movie as can be made, but as a thriller trying to be just entertainment I don't think it will hold up to scrutiny. The entertainment value ends up being the tap-dance of Hollywood's nice guys Hanks and Howard in dealing with settings and issues that super-secular Hollywood holds in contempt. If you go to the movie interested in tracking that, then it's worth sitting through. But otherwise it will be all about why an unarmed scientist feels comfortable walking into dark abandoned buildings expecting to find a brilliant and powerful murderer.