Cardinal sins

Angels and Demons is more lurid schlock
from the creators of The Da Vinci Code

PAPAL PULP: Hanks and Zurer

by MARK SLUTSKY

You could probably glean a lot from a detailed, scholarly unpacking of what exactly is going on, sociologically and psychologically, in the overwhelming popular success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and its offshoots. To put it lightly, there’s a lot going on in there: thinly-coded anti-Catholicism; post-9/11 conspiracy mania; simultaneous reverence for and suspicion of religion; the desire to see gruesome acts of murder performed in sacred spaces. A study like that would at least make Brown’s writing and its movie adaptations—the latest of which is Ron Howard’s Angels and Demons—seem so much more interesting than the lurid, pulpy trash that it is.

The Da Vinci Code, the book, was nonsense, but it was at least a page-turner. Howard’s adaptation, though, was slow-paced and bafflingly solemn and reverent—a truly bad and boring film. Angels and Demons is a little fleeter on its feet, but it’s still a goof, a repetitive, self-serious thriller.

Tom Hanks returns (but his mullet doesn’t) as Robert Langdon, an Ivy League symbologist who’s brought in by the Vatican after the pope dies mysteriously and four cardinals are kidnapped. It looks like the mysterious humanist sect known as the Illuminati has resurfaced, and not only are they threatening to kill a cardinal every hour on the hour, they’ve also got their hands on some highly-destructive anti-matter, with which they’re scheming to blow up the Vatican.

With the help of saucy scientist Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), Hanks gets to decoding the arcane symbols and references that the kidnappers have helpfully left behind. But no matter what Howard does, he can’t make this stuff exciting. The greater part of the movie consists of Hanks and friends rushing from one church to another, solving puzzles and finding corpses.

The strange thing about the success of this stuff is that you’d think that a movie obsessed with symbology, Renaissance art, Baroque sculpture, riddle-solving and church history would be a rare highbrow entertainment, a dry amusement for academics. How Brown and Howard manage to turn such subjects into grist for the broadest and most predictable popular shlock is a more interesting mystery than anything dug up in this boring adventure.

ANGELS AND DEMONS OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, MAY 15