Angels & Demons - "Everyone's a Sinner Baby..."
Hanks and Ryan first worked together in 1984’s Splash, and more recently in the Da vinci Code. This latest re-teaming is a prequel to the aforementioned Da vinci Code a universally popular work of fiction that made its way onto the big screen in a big way and not for all the right reasons, deeply offending the Catholic church and polarising the religious community.
Tom also suffered his own “make up malfunction” with an amusing haircut that was supposed to make the character look for refined. Sadly this served as a comedic plot pot through the movie and made it a hard task for the audience to take the character seriously.
This time around, the hair is shorter and so is the length of the scenes, the whole thing seems quicker, and this is aided by signposts in the dialogue that restrict the movie to the course of a single day. Howard must have taken a few cues from Brian Grazers' ‘24’ with this one as the anticipation of the impending doom does serve to draw in the viewer.
The comparisons with 24 stop there though, as Tom Hanks and Keifer Sutherland are worlds apart in terms of action hero status and you cant help but sympathise with Tom Hanks, as he notably seems uncomfortable in the action genre.
Ewan McGregor as the Camerlengo Patrick Mckenna who steps in to run the Vatican after the death of the Pope, plays a convincing priest whose Irish dialect is at odds with McGregor's Scottish heritage.
The plot centres around the Large Hadron Collider being vandalized and precious anti-matter being stolen, and used as part of a terrorist attack on the Vatican, by the Illuminati an ancient secret society that believed science held the answers to the theory of evolution and creation and that God hand’s had nothing to do with it. A taboo in the Holy City.
If I had a criticism other than heavy going religious dialogue, it would be the accents used by non-Italians in the movie. Some more thorough work could have been done with dialects that would have enhanced credibility somewhat.
Dan Brown’s rhetoric of religion Vs Science is still evident throughout, though this time around its not a one-sided war.
“ Be careful, these are men of God after all”
VIEW TRAILER HERE
4/5
