Angels & Demons

When you have one of the best directors in cinema history and one of the best actors as well, and you give them a second chance from a prior flop of a film with a better storyline, you would think that they could pull it off. Ron Howard & Tom Hanks gave more of a disappointment than George Lucas & Harrison Ford did in the 4th Indy flick in new release of Angels & Demons.

I was excited to see Angels & Demons, because the story is about a revenge story of the Illuminati which is a secret group of scientist who were persecuted by the Catholic Church. The current day Pope had unexpectedly died, and since they don’t do an autopsy of the Popes body, they started going through the tradition of naming the new Pope of the church. The illuminati announce a threat on the church, which they were going to blow up the Vatican with Antimatter bomb.

The Vatican calls in Robert Langdon, who is played by Tom Hanks to solve this mystery because he had written a book about the Illuminati and he can help them crack the case.

The assistant to the Pope who holds all the keys of catholic authority in the process of a new Pope are announced is named Camerlengo Carlo Ventresca played by Ewan McGregor. He was coordinating everything that search for the bomb and the 4 cardinals who were kidnapped by this secret organization.

Basically it was a difficult movie to watch. If I hadn’t read the book before hand, I probably would have been lost from the beginning. It is hard to watch a fast pace movie that takes pauses for Tom Hanks character could try to explain what is going on. It just didn’t work. In fact it was stupid.

There were many things that they could’ve done to make it work, but it felt like you needed to read the book to understand the movie. The problem with that route is that the whole point of watching a movie is to follow along and enjoy the story telling without having to read the book it came from.

Since they didn’t explain the majority of the background, it was funny to see how a guy who made the Catholic church to shame in the Davinci Code, would look for him specifically, as if he was the only guy in the world who understands great adversary. There were too many holes, and not enough explanation.

By the time we got to the ending, it reminded me of what the late Sydney Pollack said about movie making “It is so hard to make a good movie, because there are so many variables involved.” Unfortunately this movie had to many variables to make it any good.

If you liked this film I recommend:

Davinci Code
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade