I didn’t find anything similarly fun or stimulating about the ideas in Angels & Demons. Without any pretty paintings to look at, all that’s left is a blank-faced Tom Hanks getting sucked into and gnawed and chewed by a starved plot, presumably hanging in there to collect a huge paycheck some time after being swallowed whole.
I want everyone to see Angels & Demons so I can ask: “Can you honestly find a single moment when you cared about anyone up on the screen? Does Hanks’ Robert Langdon make you want to run out and become a symbologist in the way Indiana Jones made thousands want to become archeologists? Can you even remember Vittoria Vetra, the pretty heroine, after exiting the theater?”
Of course, this lack of interesting ideas and recognizably human characters leaves the viewer with no choice but to pay attention to the plot, not a good idea in this case. For a movie that relies so heavily on a twist at the end, revealing the true villain, it’s not a good thing that said villain struts about in plain sight for the entire movie winking at us as if saying, “Give it time. The movie will eventually tell you what you already know about me.”And I don’t usually care about such things, but there is a shootout with a bad guy and a handgun that had me mumbling, “Did he fire 26 shots or only 25? Well, in all this excitement, I kind of lost track. Does Langdon feel lucky? Does he, punk?”
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