Film

When The Da Vinci Code opened the Cannes Film Festival three years ago, it got a critical drubbing for being an overripe potboiler with long chunks of exposition crammed into inelegant speeches punctuated by swooping camera work to convey a sense of urgency. From some of the reviews, you’d have thought Howard was Ed Wood crossed with Leni Riefenstahl. With a few years’ distance, it looks as if some of the reviewers might have been expressing their antagonism to Dan Brown’s novel more than the film. The film, of course, went on to make a gajillion dollars. Angels & Demons is an overripe potboiler with long chunks of exposition crammed into inelegant speeches punctuated by swooping camera work to convey a sense of urgency, and, you know, it’s harmless fun.

Once again, symbologist Robert Langdon (Hanks) gets drawn into a historical puzzle that can only be solved using his encyclopedic knowledge of symbolism. This time, the Catholic Church calls him in when four cardinals are kidnapped during the process of selecting a new pope. The kidnappers, who claim to be the ancient anti-Catholic society the Illuminati, are going to kill one cardinal an hour and then blow up Vatican City using an antimatter device. Langdon has to figure out Illuminati iconography to thwart their dastardly plot.

Much of the historical background is hustled out at a frantic pace in West Wing–style walk-and-talk conversations between Langdon and a hottie physicist (Zurer). Though delving into historical trivia is part of the thrill of the novel, Howard clearly doesn’t care much about Bernini and Michelangelo. This is two hours of people racing the clock. Not great, and fairly forgettable, but not the end of intelligent culture.