Written by Dan Brown

Directed by


Starring
 Tom Hanks, Ayelet Zurer,

 

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.

 

 

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