Angels & Demons
12A, Nationwide
Angels & Demons is based on the book by Dan ‘Da Vinci Code’ Brown and is directed by Ron Howard and stars Tom Hanks and all I can really say about it is this: if there is one movie you don’t see this year, do make it this one. Or, as you’ll never read on the poster but is true nonetheless: ‘Magnificently missable. Do yourselves a favour’. At first, it’s so preposterous and so bad it’s almost OK, kind of funny, but after 20 minutes even that wears thin and then it hits you: there are still two hours to go. How, how, how is it to be endured? Mid-way through, at the press screening, I even heard one reviewer emit a noise of the sort I had never heard before. It was part-yawn, part-anguished-howl-of-boredom, and went, ‘AEEOOOWWWW.’ Now, it wouldn’t do to name names, for fear of reprisals but, yes, it was me. This means that next time I see me, I’ll probably have to punch myself. Damn.
So, first there was the Hollywood blockbuster version of The Da Vinci Code — also directed by Howard and starring Hanks — and now this, in which Hanks returns as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, who is tootling about as Harvard symbologists no doubt do when an official from the Vatican summons him to Rome. The Vatican, it appears, is in trouble and it is big trouble. Following the death of the old Pope, a secret, science-worshipping society — the Illuminati — have kidnapped four cardinals and have also planted a bomb in Vatican City. The bomb is made of ‘anti-matter’, which the society stole from CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva. Quite why they went to all this trouble and didn’t just opt for a regular bomb, is anyone’s guess.
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