Directed by
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Angels and
Demons The
good news is, “Angels and Demons” is not
doing well at the box office. The
bad news is that it’s doing any business at all. I don’t like to characterize films
with terms like ‘dogs,’ or even ‘catastrophes,’ but
“Angels and Demons” is about as bad as a film can get and now
Columbia is in the hole for more than a hundred million dollars. Where were the grownups when this was
pitched? These guys are worse
than bankers. The
story, by Dan Brown – before he wrote “The DaVinci
Code” – is about skullduggery at the Vatican, in case you
hadn’t seen the trailers.
This time it’s about the Illuminati, a group that thinks the
Church went awry some 400 years ago – something having to do with
Galileo, I believe. Anyway, once
again Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks again, of course) is summoned to the Vatican
at the same time that a piece of antimatter is taken from the CERN laboratory
and accelerator in
Switzerland. Did
you know that antimatter could be taken in a hand-held glass container? No, and I didn’t either, and
frankly I don’t think the filmmakers knew it, but you’ve got to
start someplace, so that’s it.
Only a battery is holding it from exploding and putting everyone in
the Vatican to death, but it is supposedly in the hands of Dr. Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) and would
normally be safe. Of course if it
all went well, we wouldn’t have a picture, would we? Meanwhile,
Dr. Langdon, the Symbologist – and I still
don’t know if there is such an academic discipline, but no matter
– is at the Vatican to solve the mystery of the Illuminati, just when
the Illuminati are hell-bent on doing great damage to the Church, namely
blowing St. Peter’s up with the antimatter and killing everyone in the
Vatican. So
Dr. Langdon is busy following clues from one church to another, Dr. Vetra is counting the time till the battery runs out (at
midnight, of course), and the College of Cardinals is busy trying to elect a
new pope, because I forgot to tell you that the last pope died under
mysterious circumstances. |