Symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is the Indiana Jones for lapsed Catholics and New Agers who buy their books at the airport, the redeemer for every suburban conspiracy theorist certain that the truth is out there if you just follow the signs sprinkled across the globe by the Elders. Langdon should probably be president, or at least running the space program, but he contents himself with his humble post at Harvard, patiently waiting for his petitions to inspect the Vatican archives to get approved.
Angels & Demons opens with a dead pope, some stolen secret antimatter on the verge of blowing up a substantial chunk of Rome, and the return of the Illuminati, still pissed off after succumbing to Vatican atrocities back in the 17th century and promising to murder the four favourites to assume the Papal throne in a matter sufficiently baroque to get Thomas Harris salivating. This is a job for Langdon, who finally gets his coveted tour of the Catholic classifieds and leads the mission to smoke out the bad guys with the help of a sexy Italian scientist (Ayelet Zurer).
But who will help writers Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp adapt Dan Brown’s mega-selling sequel to his mega-selling The Da Vinci Code? Whether taken from the source material or their own doubtlessly numbed imaginations, the pair has spawned the most audaciously awkward—and seemingly endless—expository dialogue this side of Underworld: Evolutions, while fashioning Langdon into a formidable fountain of redundancies. And who will help Ron Howard, a director capable of rendering even giant explosions fantastically boring, who himself possesses an unholy knack for redundancy?
Brown’s tale is a genuine feat, a mind-bogglingly elaborate hybrid of fanciful imagination and inconsistent baloney, replete with a climactic reversal hoisted up via hysterically implausible detective work, such as Langdon and the Italian’s stumbling upon a surveillance video recording of the heavies helpfully explaining the nefarious plan, all of it ostensibly elevated into the realm of social commentary by constant discussions about the tensions between science and religion, including boilerplate arguments between extras about stem cell research. Howard and company lack any critical distance from Brown’s hokum, squeezing out this wearyingly overlong thriller, sleeping soundly with the knowledge that the books’ legion of fans will come regardless. “Faith is a gift I have yet to receive,” Langdon says in one of his more lucid moments. But who needs faith when you’ve got box office gold?
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