The Vatican Vs. The Large Hadron Collider

Angels & Demons contains my favourite onscreen caption of the year: “The Necropolis: 11:15 p.m.” It also contains my favourite location switch since, like, forever, when director Ron Howard whisks us from The Vatican, where the College of Cardinals is meeting to select a new pope, to — of all places! — the Large Hadron Collider, where scientists are about to whip up a cylindrical tube full of precious antimatter. But the scientists’ joy will be short-lived, because just minutes later, a thief breaks into the lab and steals the antimatter cylinder. Before we have time to even catch our breath, we’re off to Harvard University, where symbology professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is doing laps in the pool.

How these three events will link up — and how they all relate to Raphael, Bernini, Galileo, the Illuminati, an orphaned Irish priest (Ewan McGregor), the oxygen-free rooms of the Vatican archives, a leggy “integumental physicist” (Israeli actress Ayulet Zurer), four kidnapped priests, five branding irons, several dozen cardinals, an exploding helicopter, an exploding car, a plot to murder the pope, a severed eyeball, and a whole lot of conveniently placed surveillance cameras — is the substance of Angels & Demons, which sounds a whole lot more exciting (and appealingly nutty) than it actually is.

In fact, the film really only sparks to life near the insane penultimate sequence, when Ewan McGregor’s character takes a more central role in the action — I don’t want to give anything away, but Angels & Demons contains the most memorable Catholic skydiving sequence since those nuns jumped out of the airplane without wearing parachutes in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely.

For most of the rest of its running time, I’m sad to say, Angels & Demons takes itself way too seriously — Ron Howard, who also directed The Da Vinci Code, really seems to think Dan Brown’s pulpy thrillers deserve the classy prestige-picture treatment, and he doesn’t permit himself or Tom Hanks even a momentary wink to the camera. Give me Nicolas Cage’s National Treasure movies any day — they may be a shameless ripoff of the Dan Brown formula, but at least they have a healthy willingness to own up to their own ridiculousness. Let me tell you, it’s a whole lot more fun watching Helen Mirren jauntily slum her way through National Treasure: Book of Secrets than it is to see Armin Mueller-Stahl and Stellan Skarsgard grimly trotting out their stock performances in yet another big-budget international thriller. (Although it’s pretty amusing to hear Skarsgard greet Hanks by grumbling, “Oh good... the symbologist is here.”)

The underlying premise of Dan Brown’s books — there’s evidence of a massive, ancient conspiracy in our very midst, which you can detect if you only know how to decode the symbols — isn’t hard to understand. But when his stories are transferred to film, their ticking-timebomb scenarios are weighed down by pages of expository dialogue about ambigrams and Vatican history that not even a screen performer as natural as Tom Hanks can make dramatic.

The movie that Angels & Demons reminds me of most is, weirdly, the 1989 flop The January Man — in that one, it was Kevin Kline on the trail of a serial killer who was using some kind of code based on prime numbers and musical notation to determine where and when he’d strike next. I’m not sure why that was supposed to be dramatically interesting, anymore than why I’m supposed to get excited by all those statues pointing in the direction of the next clue in Angels & Demons.

Or were they pointing at the screening room next door? That’s where Star Trek was playing — and don’t think I wasn’t tempted to play symbologist and follow the clues to a livelier movie.