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Angels & Demons
Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code was a film adaptation of Dan Brown's book, an average story about a man with a dopey hairdo and an intriguing premise about self flagellating religious zealots with barb wire garter belts and clandestine codes hidden within Leonardo's art. Sensibly, Angels & Demons jettisons the dopey hairdo but to its detriment also purges an intriguing premise. What is left is an average story utilising an unremarkable idea and not so much as a hairdo as a talking point.
Looking over Ron Howard's filmography it seems clear that he has his passion projects and he has those that merely pay the bills; for every Frost/Nixon and Apollo 13 there's an EdTV and Backdraft. Angels & Demons is definitely a bill payer. You get the impression that this story was conceived as a direct result of the runaway success of The Da Vinci Code and hence suffers from a severe case of sequelitis; Robert Langdon reduced to merely a kind of ecclesiastical Indiana Jones decoding a seemingly endless procession of tedious cryptic clues. The former story was based on an intriguing idea of which Dan Brown was not the author, I suspect the central idea for Angels & Demons was largely of Brown's manufacture.
The film includes some truly ridiculous setups that completely defy any sane logic. Take, for instance, the set piece where our hero becomes trapped in a high security, climate controlled vault during a power outage. When the power goes out, the backup batteries kick in but apparently the uninterruptible power supply doesn't power the stringently controlled air conditioning system, neither does it power the electronic lock on the door. It does, however, power a video monitor (the only thing it does power other than the moody lighting) that kindly advises how much battery life is left as you die a rapid asphyxiating death. Indeed, judging by the rate at which our hero is running out of oxygen, we can only presume that the power failure results in all the air being immediately evacuated from the room as well. Ridiculous! And this is not an isolated example.
In the end when one of the good guys is seemingly approaching certain death, the ‘sad’ music is wailing on the soundtrack but do we care? No, not really, but it nicely sums up the movie as a whole.
Stuart Jamieson
official website
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