Angels & Demons

Director: Ron Howard
Screenwriters: David Koepp, Akiva Goldsman
Starring: Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgård
Running time: 138 mins
Certificate: 12A

The biggest mystery about The Da Vinci Code doesn't really lie in the intricate and convoluted riddles it weaves, but more how Ron Howard succeeded in making a movie that felt like it took longer to watch than it did to read Dan Brown's originating novel. $750 million in box office receipts later - enough to make Tom Hanks's sceptic symbologist believe in miracles - and it's no surprise that a sequel is rolling into cinemas.

Angels & Demons sees Robert Langdon (Hanks) recruited by the Vatican when secret society the Illuminati kidnap and threaten to kill four cardinals then detonate a hi-tech antimatter bomb under St Peter's Square. With the help of physicist Vittoria Vetra (Zurer), Langdon embarks on a mad puzzle-solving dash across Rome to save the day. Howard juxtaposes Langdon's frantic search with a crisis behind the doors of the Basilica - the Pope has just died and the cardinals are unable to come to an agreement on their next leader. The Camerlengo (McGregor), in caretaker charge until the new selection, aids Langdon while attempting to smooth over problems within the Vatican.

Shorn of his mullet, Hanks is more at ease as a thinking man's action hero this time. He's helped by Howard's improved grasp of action (no abysmal Smart car chase here) - the staging of a set-piece in the Vatican archives where Langdon must escape a room that's quickly running out of oxygen is tense and funny, and Hanks is the type of actor who can effortlessly blend the dramatic and comedic. Howard dances around location problems well (a man drowning in the obelisk fountain was never going to get approved!), though there's a hideous computerised recreation of the Pantheon's interior, which looks like a frame-by-frame Microsoft Paint compositing job.

There are still moments of awkwardness from the usually dependable Hanks, like when he takes a dig at the Swiss Guard and comes across like Fonzie clad in a tweed jacket ("C'mon fellas, you called me"). McGregor is lumbered with a difficult role, that of an action hero priest, but he's skilled enough to paint his character with the required subtle brush strokes. It's cringe-worthy, though, when he casually mentions how he can fly a helicopter, and is called upon to do just that in a finale complete with dreadful "ascent to heaven" symbolism.

Where Brown mastered the art of getting readers to turn the page, rocketing the story along fast enough so his plot holes and portentousness never become much of an issue, his two big screen adaptations suffer from an inertia that brings these problems to the foreground. Screenwriters David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, generally solid plot technicians, come unstuck with a wordy, 'tell don't show' script that insists on joining the dots for viewers instead of letting them do it for themselves. Angels & Demons never really wants to admit that it's an absurd folly masquerading as a high-brow thriller, but it's marginally more dynamic than its predecessor and will probably pass time reasonably well as in-flight entertainment.


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