ANGELS & DEMONS

“ANGELS & DEMONS” (Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Armin Mueller-Stahl & Stellan Skarsgard)

Count me among the many that didn’t care for the first installment of this series, “The Da Vinci Code”. I liked Ian McKellen in it, but for the most part I found it to be a whole lot about nothin’. “Angels & Demons” has a better plot – there’s a real life & death situation at hand & a race against time to save hundreds of lives. True, we are talking about Catholic lives, but they still matter. That’s a joke, Catholics, lighten up for a change.
So I liked the premise – The pope has recently died & as the Cardinals gather to elect a new pontiff, 4 of the betting favorites are kidnapped by an organization calling itself the Illuminati; supposedly a group of scientist that tried to work with the church to come up with a plausible reason for creation while still keeping God in the picture. But the church refused to accept the Illuminati’s findings & drove them out of Vatican City in the 18th Century.
The voice of the Illuminati tells the world that one Cardinal will be assassinated every hour on the hour at 8, 9, 10 & 11 PM; then at midnight, a stolen canister of anti-matter will explode somewhere in the city causing mass destruction of biblical portions.
Since there are no Illuminati experts in the Vatican, nor in Italy – the police call on American symbologist, Robert Langdon (Hanks)
This is where the storyline gets tiresome, I enjoyed the racing against time to save the Cardinals idea, but it is how Langdon determines where the assassinations are going to take place that became irritating – There wasn’t anything clever about it – Hanks would strike a ‘deep into thought’ pose for a few seconds & then spout out some obscure location & off they’d go. I actually had to laugh out loud when at one point, Langdon points to 2 particular angel statues & says, “The angels are pointing the way!”
Ewan McGregor plays the right hand man of the deceased pope & thus is ‘semi-‘ in charge of the Vatican until a new pope is picked. The way this character ‘evolves’ thru the film doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you throw logic out the window; which, in a film regarding religion isn’t difficult to do, so why am I complaining?
Ayelet Zurer plays the female scientist that helped to create the canister of anti-matter & then allowed the Illuminati to walk out of their super-secret laboratory with the extremely dangerous ‘creation’.
Armin Mueller-Stahl does his usual fine job as a stodgy old Cardinal that finds it difficult to maintain his forgiving grin while being ‘told’ what he should be doing by McGregor’s ‘camerlengo’. By the way, I finally figured out why they call them ‘cardinals’ – they all dress in bright red plumage with matching beanies, so they do indeed look like a group of St. Louis baseball fans.
As head of the Swiss Guard (the protectors of the pope) Stellan Skarsgard acts as though he doesn’t WANT to help Langdon stop the kidnapped Cardinals from being murdered – making it over-obvious that he is indeed the mastermind behind the Illuminati. I don’t feel as though I’m revealing a spoiler with that because it becomes very apparent from the moment the character is introduced & denies Langdon access to the information he needs to decipher the location of the first assassination. Which I had a problem with as well; the clues are embedded in the brick flooring & the streets are swarming with tourists & anxious Catholics, yet Langdon is still able to find the exact clues he needs to lead them to the site.
Now, I don’t mean to pick on Catholics, even though I have, I just don’t ‘mean’ to – but at one point the ‘swarm’ is warned to evacuate the city due to a bomb threat (The anti-matter is the true culprit) A short time later a news reporter is announcing how even more people have entered the square since that warning was given... Seems as if those darn Catholics just don’t believe anything anyone tells them unless they're dressed like a big bird...
In the beginning, I liked the way this film was heading, by the time it gets to the finale, I was shaking my head in disbelief... which, for me, is nothing new. Hopefully you’ll find the shocking climax more ‘entertaining’ than I.