Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. People sure did spend a lot of time picking apart every small detail, plot hole, inconsistency or just dopey maneuver in STAR TREK last week; let's see if these same people bother to do the same with the second big-screen adaptation of author Dan Brown's Robert Langdon stories, ANGELS & DEMONS. My guess is nobody will for two reasons, and one of them isn't "because the film's plot is flawless." The first reason is that nobody cares as much about Langdon's exploits as they do about the folks of the Trek universe. Second, ANGELS & DEMONS isn't nearly as ambitious or adventurous as Trek or 75 percent of the other films I see in a given summer. It's not the kind of film people bother analyzing ad nauseum, which I guess brings me back to reason one. There wasn't a moment in this film's entire 2-hour 20-minute length that I didn't know what most of the bigger-picture secrets were in this story. I knew who were going to be revealed as the real hidden bad guys and what kind of treachery they were up do. Not that the movie doesn't have its share of lofty intentions and a great cast to give those intentions weight and significance; it does. But at some point early in the film, I stopped caring what happened to most of the characters or even whether Vatican City was lost to the world with the help of a bomb created out of antimatter. I guess it's the lapsed Catholic in me. Let's get into some of the performance first, because at this point you either know the basic plot or you don't because--all together now--you don't care. Robert Langdon is the least interesting character from an actor that has spent his entire career creating memorable and interesting characters, even when the elements that made them so weren't in the script. Langdon uses history to solve ancient puzzles. I'm sure in print, reading the innermost thought processes of Langdon is fascinating, but this massive amount of brain activity does not translate well to a visual medium. Tom Hanks spends a lot of time vocalizing his thoughts as he combs through the Vatican archives (long kept away from his prying eyes because of what happened in THE DA VINCI CODE). But here's the thing, Langdon is following a trail that has been in existence for hundreds of years. If the ancient order of the Illuminati changed even one small detail of this path (which they easily could have), Langdon's smarts would be of no use. This deduction led me to believe that the powers-that-be wanted Langdon to find the bomb in a very specific manner, which would lead into a series of predictable events, blah, blah, blah. This is how I figure shit out; it's not that tough. I was happy to see director Ron Howard cast a great group of non-Americans in the key roles, including Danish superstar Nikolaj Lie Kaas as the Illuminati terrorist who kidnaps the four cardinals in line for the Papacy and plants the bomb guaranteed to decimate Vatican City and a great deal of Rome. Also on hand are the always-hammy and reliable Stellan Skarsgard as the head of the Swiss Guard that protects the Pope, Armin Mueller-Stahl as the cardinal in charge of running the process to select a new pope after the most recent one has died, Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer (from Munich) as one of the scientists who created the antimatter device, and Ewan McGregor as the young priest who was the late Pope's personal assistant and also seems to be the man in the Vatican with the greatest knowledge of Illuminati lore. McGregor is actually pretty great in this role, especially in an impassioned monologue where he pleads with the cardinals to abandon finding a new Pope temporarily so they can evacuate the Vatican for safety. But if it seems slightly strange that someone of McGregor's caliber would get caught playing second fiddle to Hanks or play such a bland, nice-guy character, well, you'd be on the right path. One thing I did like about the film is that it all takes place in less than a day, and most of the film takes place in a five-hour window, so the sense of immediacy and urgency is sustained and impressive. I half expected to see a loudly ticking digital clock in the middle of the screen every so often, but alas it was not to be. I know that Howard and crew weren't allowed to film in or around the Vatican, but it sure feels like they were. The crowd sequences are among the most impressive; I'm still trying to figure out how and where they managed to create such massive crowds through which the characters run. But the film's biggest drawback is something I alluded to earlier: I just didn't care what happened to any of these people, especially not the four kidnapped cardinals that are getting killed every hour leading up to the big bomb detonating. Not wanting to give away anything three or four of you might still find suspenseful, I won't go into any detail about the huuuuge problems and lapses in judgment and sense that ANGELS & DEMONS makes (beginning and ending with the fact that if Langdon was never a factor in these events, the outcome would have been exactly the same). That said, I was far from loathing this effort, simply because things never stopped moving long enough for me to notice the time passing or to really contemplate just how natural-born dumb this movie was at times. There are times when I laughed out loud at some of the filmmakers were trying to pull--a sequence involving a helicopter comes to mind--and I'm pretty sure I wasn't supposed to. Still, the film's consistent and repeated moments of audacity kept me just amused enough by the proceedings to never look at my watch and still get caught up in some of the better chases scenes...plus I just wanted to see if they really blew up the Vatican. ANGELS & DEMONS is a top-to-bottom mess, but it's the kind of mess I know how to deal with, process, and still walk out feeling like my time wasn't completely wasted. This is not a recommendation, but it's far from an outright condemnation. I think we know each other well enough for both of us to know whether you are, for some reason, predisposed to like films like this. I am not, but I can appreciate some of its finer points without really enjoying the experience as a whole. May is filled with great releases still to come; hold out for some of those instead. -- Capone capone@aintitcoolmail.com
