Torture Porn

Movies based on the books of Dan Brown suck. I put them right
alongside the Alien vs. Predator movies, the American Pie monstrosities and those horrendous Beethoven flicks. Tom Hanks
… Ron Howard … please stop, NOW!!!

Angels and Demons starts dumb and gets dumber as it plods
along. This is a movie where you can figure out who the bad guy is from
watching the promo commercials. It’s also littered with continuity
problems. (There’s some business involving a retinal scanner at the
beginning that blew my mind with its ineptitude.) This is a movie that
presents scenarios so illogical, so preposterous, that it makes the
above-mentioned franchises look like high art.

The events of the book actually happened before The Da Vinci
Code, but the film acts like a sequel. Robert Langdon (Hanks) is
working on a book when the Vatican contacts him. He thinks it’s because
they are going to grant him access to their archives for research, but
it turns out his “expertise” is needed for a grave situation.

The pope is dead, and somebody has kidnapped the four cardinals most
likely to replace him. That somebody plans to knock off the four
candidates on an hourly basis, leading up to a cataclysmic explosion of
“antimatter.” The claim: This antimatter is the stuff that caused
creation as we know it—basically, it’s God’s version of flour in
his big-assed creation cake.

As I watched, I was asking myself: “WTF?”

Langdon allies with a female scientist who was working on the
antimatter (Ayelet Zurer, who is, of course, super hot). They follow
clues left by the psycho and find themselves running around to
different relics and ruins in Rome, usually arriving a little too late
to save the life of the cardinals.

Those cardinals die some particularly gruesome deaths for a PG-13
movie. They’re up there with the deaths in Eli Roth’s Hostel (another decaying movie franchise that is better than this one). A
couple of dudes burn; another gets his lung punctured, complete with
blood spurting into Hanks’ face; yet another gets ashes stuffed in his
mouth until he suffocates. It’s Catholic torture porn!

Hanks is basically collecting a big paycheck while looking puzzled
and spouting a bunch of nonsense about the Illuminati. (The killer is
making the deaths look like the Illuminati—a secret religious
society dedicated to “scientific truth”—have returned.) It’s so
disappointing to watch his talents squandered in this drivel. It may be
worth it to him for the money, but Hanks can make lots of money making
great films rather than stupid puzzle movies.

The puzzles help make this film most ridiculous. The murderer gives
clues, in plain sight, regarding where the murders will be, increasing
the likelihood that his plan will be foiled. On top of this, some of
the so-called mysteries aren’t very mysterious at all; as I mentioned,
I guessed the mastermind behind the killings before I stepped into the
theater.

The supporting cast boasts some admirable talent: Stellan
Skarsgård plays a Vatican security commander; Ewan McGregor is on
hand as a high-ranking priest; and Armin Mueller-Stahl gets all dressed
up to play a cardinal. All three are good actors, yet, like Hanks, they
are forced to recite nonsensical, ridiculous dialogue.

Howard is already talking about making another film based on a Brown
novel, and Brown will continue the adventures of Robert Langdon in
The Lost Symbol, a book due out in September. No doubt: People
do love these books. I read The Da Vinci Code, and while I
didn’t care for it all that much, it was better than the movie. Perhaps
these literary puzzles play better on the page than on the silver
screen. As long as Brown keeps churning them out, they will more than
likely find their way into the cinemas.

Oh … woe is me.

This article appears in May 21-27, 2009.