Summer Movie Reviews: Angels and Demons

It's refreshing to go and see a movie that isn't made with people like myself in mind.

I am a 29-year-old, white, upper-middle class male. For over ten years, almost every film and television series has been specially calibrated to appeal to me, or at least, someone like me. When I was in college, I'd occasionally take free movie passes for films that were in post production and the studio would want to preview for test audiences. I saw Pitch Black, Gone in 60 Seconds, Payback, and a couple other movies this way. They were all fine, but the one thing that I noticed that separated me from the studios' ideal moviegoer was that I see upwards of thirty first-run movies a year. I'm guessing this puts me well above the average.

Angels and Demons is the follow-up to The DaVinci Code, and while the original Dan Brown novel takes place before the events of The DaVinci Code, A&D is set a couple of years later, which is alluded to through a handful of knowing glances between the hero Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and a handful of Vatican officials (Stellan Skarsgard and Armin Mueller-Stahl). The plot is pretty stupid: the pope has died, and as the College of Cardinals convenes to nominate a new pope, an ancient group called the Illuminati have kidnapped the four most likely successors, as well as a canister of anti-matter, which has the capability of vaporizing Vatican City "in light" (get it? They're the "Illuminati"? Light? This is the level that Angels and Demons functions on). Tom Hanks and a comely physicist (Ayelet Zurer) are enlisted by the Vatican police to locate the missing Cardinals as well as to recover the antimatter before it is released at midnight.

The DaVinci Code worked like a solid puzzle videogame, like Myst. There were puzzles to be solved, unlocking doors and solving riddles to get to the next level of the story. Where The DaVinci Code probably failed was in underestimating the intelligence of their audience. In case you didn't understand that a "V" was the cup, and the "A" was the arrow, director Ron Howard would helpfully(?) highlight the solutions for you. Thanks, Ron.

Angels and Demons is for people who found the puzzles and solutions in DaVinci too confusing. The puzzles are totally absent, replaced with angels who point the way to every solution. The dramatic moments in Angels and Demons is exclusively people standing in various locales around Rome, looking around for the next arrow to point the way. Because the threats only come every hour on the hour, after one puzzle is solved, the heroes stand around for 45 minutes until panickingly deciding that they better go get the next clue.

Leah and I were the youngest adults in the theatre at our 3:30 screening on Sunday. The group in front of us was four women in their late 60s or early 70s. This is a movie designed for them. It's in many ways a big-screen version of CSI: the characters are largely ciphers, but there is an urgent mystery in a foreign locale. These are the kinds of mystery novels that my grandmother adores.

Also like CSI, Angels and Demons is incredibly violent. People are branded, burned alive, drowned, shot, an eye is removed from a corpse's head. It's shocking that this movie earned a PG-13 rating. Apparently you can brand four elderly men and it's okay for the kids to see, but if you use the F-word or show a booby, then that's only safe for adults.

For performances, Tom Hanks brings less to Robert Langdon in this film than he did in the previous one. I wonder, after failing to show interest in adorable Audrey Tatou in the first film and not giving Ms. Zurer a second glance in this one, whether Langdon is supposed to be gay. Perhaps he's just studious? The most enjoyable performances come from Skarsgard and Mueller-Stahl, although Ewan MacGregor is also enjoyable as a young priest invested with the administrative powers of the pope until a new one is found.

If you haven't seen Angels and Demons by now, there's really no reason to. Go see the new Terminator movie.

Final Verdict: Not as good as Stepbrothers, but (probably) better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.