Starring: Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgard
Director: Ron Howard
Category: IIB (English, Italian and Latin)
There's a scene in Angels and Demons in which the film's symbologist protagonist, Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks, right), is asked whether he's 'anti-Catholic' after he reels off an anecdote about a conservative pontiff's decision to chop the genitalia off nude male statues so as to preserve morality. Without missing a beat, he says, smirking: 'I'm anti-vandalism.'
Langdon's response - and the way he delivers it - speaks volumes about the tone of Ron Howard's follow-up to the Vatican-baiting adaptation of Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code. With a story that suggests the flaws of the Catholic Church only make it human, Angels and Demons is hardly anti-Catholic; a review in the Holy See's official newspaper last week describes the film as 'harmless entertainment'. Langdon's exchange with his interrogator, meanwhile, is representative of how Howard has positioned the film as an action thriller, complete with the genre's trademark one-liners.
The latter sinks the film. Casting aside ideological concerns, the conspiracies in Brown's books have always been excessively far-fetched: in this case, the story is about the apparent re-emergence of a secret sect called the Illuminati that claims to have kidnapped four top-ranking cardinals and planted a deadly bomb in the Vatican just as the process of selecting a new pope begins.