“Now why in the name of god did I say I'd do this?” Tom Hanks ponders the big question in Angels & Demons

Da Vinci Does Rome

Religio-thriller prequel needs your prayers

Any art lovers heading for Rome this summer who want a pre-trip peek at the glories that await—from the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s and the Roman Empire-era Pantheon, to the heroic sculptures in Piazza Navona and the transcendent statues of Bernini—could do worse than book passage via Angels & Demons. The bad news is that all that stunning Renaissance art has to share screen time with a bombastic, long-winded and surprisingly old-fashioned religio-thriller that races around the Eternal City on what amounts to an art-history scavenger hunt while wasting the talents of fine European actors.

Angels, which is the literary prequel to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code but functions as a cinematic sequel as far as Hollywood is concerned, once again sees Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) dragged back into the murky—and surprisingly dangerous—world of Vatican politics. A much-beloved pope has just died and during this interregnum the cardinals are busy choosing a replacement for the so-called Vicar of Rome. But four of the leading candidates for the position have been kidnapped, and a mysterious group known as the Illuminati is threatening to kill them, at one-hour intervals, leading up to midnight.

Then things threaten to get really sticky, because these anti-Catholic terrorists are planning to cap their protest with a massive explosion that will destroy much of Vatican City. The bomb is made from antimatter that has been stolen from the (real-life) CERN laboratory in Switzerland, that specializes in high-energy particle acceleration; this so-called “god particle” is the explosive of choice of the Illuminati because it represents science’s bold efforts to explore the mysteries at the core of the universe. It also references the long-ago conflict between the 17th century Vatican, which promoted faith at the expense of science, and the founding members of the Illuminati, scholars who, like Galileo, bravely sought out scientific truth even if it contradicted Catholic dogma. Church leaders wasted little time in suppressing and eventually martyring these early scientists—and, three centuries later, it seems as though they are about to pay for those sins. Big time.

After setting up this bold, albeit simplistic conflict between faith and science, director Ron Howard propels the plot along in a one-note fashion, repetitiously whipsawing Langdon from one end of Rome to the other as he follows arcane clues that he decodes from Latin inscriptions, the posture and provenance of famous religious statues, and other art arcana, all in an attempt to get to the sites where the cardinals are about to be murdered in time to save them. (Rest assured, gore hounds: the script ensures there are a lot of cardinals dispatched with sanguinary gusto.) Langdon is accompanied in his quest by the token tag-along beauty (Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer, playing a physicist from CERN who will defuse the bomb—should they be lucky enough to get to it in time).

The not-uninteresting cast of supporting characters includes a senior cardinal (Armin Mueller-Stahl), oozing gravitas with just the right undercurrent of conspiratorial creepiness; the patronizing head of the Swiss Guard (Stellan Skarsgard), the elite force responsible for maintaining order in the Vatican; and the dead pope’s protégé (Ewan McGregor), an idealistic priest who has the unenviable task of breaking the seclusion of the cardinals in order to inform them of the threat posed by the Illuminati—and then compounds his sin by delivering a gratingly simplistic speech about “religion and science moving forward in harmony” that stinks up the screen with half-baked rhetoric unworthy of Philosophy 101.

While Da Vinci was logy and sluggish, Angels suffers from the trots, always in too much of a hurry to get to the next crisis or plot point, until a wearying sameness takes over. And when we eventually rocket towards the movie’s ultimate revelations, they initially seem merely ludicrous but eventually attain an exalted state of the preposterous. Angels certainly has enough pace and superficial polish to entertain the uncritical; more serious fans of cinema will likely pray for Hollywood to make better movies.

★ ★ ½

(Angels & Demons continues at the Capitol, SilverCity, Uni 4 and Caprice)