Angels & Demons ** (2009, Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgård, Armin Mueller-Stahl) – Classic Movie Review 3444

Despite all its crazy plotting, frantic direction and overwrought music, Angels & Demons (2009) is mostly dull and dreary, with little grip on its story and characters and hardly any first-rate performances, even from Tom Hanks, Stellan Skarsgård and Armin Mueller-Stahl.

Too old, plodding and sombre, a miscast Tom Hanks continues to struggle effortfully through his role as Harvard symbologist Professor Robert Langdon. Despite his infamy in cracking history’s most controversial code – that’s The Da Vinci Code of course – Langdon is summoned from his American swimming pool to Rome by the Vatican.

Weirdly, they’re desperate for him to help when the secret Illuminati brotherhood captures the four candidates for the top job of new Pope and threatens to brand and kill one cardinal an hour, culminating in a bomb explosion at the Vatican. With the old Pope dead – perhaps murdered! – power resides with his right-hand man, the Camerlengo, played by Ewan McGregor with a dodgy Irish accent and a dodgier smug smirk. He can’t be up to much good then!

Director Ron Howard and screenwriters David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman take this Dan Brown nonsense far too seriously, as though it’s an adaptation of great literature, and the result is that the movie’s very little fun. From start to finish it’s shot through with credibility problems. Written before The Da Vinci Code, the story doesn’t quite work out of order as a sequel to the 2006 movie. The villain is obvious too early and the yarn’s bizarre flying cardinals climax is a hoot.

The main saving grace is the great-looking production, with a $150million budget of money just littering the screen. They even built a scale replica of St Peter’s Square when the Vatican banned filming in its grounds. The Visual Effects and Production Designs didn’t win any awards but they are outstanding.

Some might say Angels & Demons is a pacy, brain-in-neutral caper. Or is it two hours and 20 minutes in purgatory?

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 3444

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more reviews: derekwinnert.com/