Angels & Demons Movie review from modmove

LAPDANCE LARRY

SEVENTIES SIMON

PHOTOGRAPHY

COMIC ART

INTERVIEWS

Sub-menu 1.2.1.1

FESTIVALS

EXHIBITIONS

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


also featured
NEW COMPETITIONS! The Grey Competition Thanks to Icon Film Distribution, we have ten double in-season tickets to give away to The Grey! Read more >> Shame How do you connect with the disconnected? Read more >> Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a characteristically British film. Read more >> The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo The best thing about this American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that this is Fincher's version of Dragon Tattoo. Read more >> Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol After cutting his teeth on Pixar's The Incredibles, Brad Bird applies his ample talent and requisite enthusiasm for spy thrillers to live action in this, the latest installment in the foundering Mission: Impossible franchise. Read more >> Boxing Day Bash The annual Boxing Day movie feast presents Hollywood approaching the season’s end like it was a big fairy tale wedding with something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. Read more >> Puss in Boots When a franchise runs out of steam there is always the spin-off. Read more >> Attack the Block The alien invasion genre has been hit particularly hard of late with the likes of Cloverfield, District 13, Battle: Los Angeles and Aliens vs Cowboys, each one more mediocre than the last and culminating in the downright awful Skyline. So kudos to director, Joe Cornish, for at least trying something a little different. Read more >> Immortals As eye candy, Immortals ticks all the right boxes. Read more >> In Time In Time is a competent action/thriller in the Hollywood mould but coming from director, Andrew Niccol, who also wrote and directed Gattaca and wrote The Truman Show, it is disappointingly light. Read more >> Moneyball First the conundrum, I love baseball movies but don’t especially like the game itself and would never even entertain the thought of actually watching an entire game. Read more >>


Stay up to date with modmove news
about modmove
What to know how we got started? Read more >>
read the modmove blog
Check out all the random stuff that didn't make it to the website! Read more >>
contact Us
If you have any queries or if you would like more information about modmove, we would love to hear from you! Read more >>
join our mailing list
subscribe to the mailing list and receive the modmove newsletter. Full Name Email Address Enter Word Verification in box below
search
search modmove for previous news and reviews.