Review: Angels & Demons (2009)

Most remember The Da Vinci Code as nothing more than an extended religious lesson sprinkled with tepid action and glamour shots of a pretty French girl from a movie most people didn’t see. The sequel checklist, then, would go something like this: Unknown foreign beauty? Check. A controversy threatening to destroy the Church? Double check. Lots of tedious lectures, and little action? Not so fast. This time around, director Ron Howard and writer Akiva Goldsman, reuniting from the original, decided to show instead of tell. The film opens with the crunch of Camerlengo Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor) destroying the papal ring upon the death of His Holiness; the pained look on his face; the teeming crowd outside. Soon after, we’re treated to the radiant visage of Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zuler), a physicist whose looks alone should increase PhD apps. There’s a moment early in the film, where Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) asks Vittoria to record a phrase he dictates from Galileo’s notebook. She just rips out the page and runs off. This is Angels & Demons in a nutshell: less talking, more doing.

Soon, Professor Langdon informs us, in a lecture livened up by vibrant shot selection, that The Illuminati, an ancient society forced into seclusion by the Church, plans to enact its ancient vengeance by kidnapping the four prime candidates to succeed the Pope and blowing up Vatican City with a speck of antimatter from Vittoria’s lab (I’d explain what antimatter is, but you know what that’d be…). This sets off a city-trotting adventure filled with foreign dialects, surprising amounts of driving and shootouts, and none of that weird, highlighting-clues-in-gold business that made the original feel more like one of Langdon’s PowerPoints than a summer thriller.

Thanks to an active camera, more-active protagonists, and skyrocketing stakes, Angels & Demons makes lemonade out of boring Da Vinci lemons. Energized performances ratchet up the tension and breathe life into potentially stale topics. Howard and his editors, also carryovers from Da Vinci, create a momentum that propels us above and beyond the exposition potholes that crashed the first film. If anything, the plot moves along too smoothly, devolving into a repetitive tour of religious Rome, guided by Langdon’s encyclopedic knowledge of all things…well, of all things. Genius that he is, it takes Langdon all of 20 minutes to figure out the evil scheme. I guess The Illuminati weren’t fans of the first film, or they’d have come up with a plan that isn’t traceable through an archival search. Which brings me to my main complaint, still the same after three years: it’s all too easy for Langdon. Clues fall into his lap at just the right time, to the point that he ends up feeling like a walking Deus Ex Machina (I guess that’s why The Vatican hired him). But when your hero is so successful, any obstacles placed in his way feel like writerly contrivances instead of genuine stumbling blocks. If this is God guiding Langdon’s path, we get that message loud and clear. When Langdon and Vittoria encounter the villain, he simply walks away. Guess he got the memo, too.

Many people wished they could turn off The Da Vinci Code. Well, you can put Angels & Demons on mute: carefully placed close-ups, beautiful location shooting, and the occasional aerial—albeit CGI-created—vistas make the visuals as entertaining as the plot. Howard clearly got the point: It’s hard to watch a movie when you’re asleep. Films are meant to be seen, not read, no matter how acclaimed the source novel might be. And this is a film well worth watching. At least someone learned a lesson from The Da Vinci Code.

Clarence Hammond
© Cinephile Magazine, 2009