[This review contains SPOILERS for Angels and Demons (book and film)]
I would just like to say that I had read the book this movie is based on, this was a few years ago however and most of the plot points were kind of blurry in my mind. A few of them slowly came back to me during the course of the movie but I have to say the film still had me guessing and doubting my memories at some points during the film.
It seems that most of Ron Howards' films can be classified into two categories the "Oscar-Bait film" or the "smart(er) summer/holiday blockbuster". His movies have always walked the line between good and bad but have never managed to fall too far on to either side. Angels and Demons is part of the latter category and in my opinion is tilting further towards the bad side than the good one.
The main problem I had with A&D is that there is not one once of subtlety during the entire movie. The whole story is dumbed down and spoon fed for the summer blockbuster audience.
The story follows a process:
Character: Where do we go next?
Langdon: Well... *spends ten minutes explaining things to the character.*
Character: What? I don't understand your super complicated symbolic mumbo-jumbo?
Langdon: Oh sorry *Spends another ten minutes explaining things in a simpler way so that the character and the audience (because we're so stupid) will understand*
Character: Oh! We have to go save the cardinal!
This is a story that needs to be read because even as Tom Hanks explains all this stuff to us in simple English everything is so rushed that we are not even given the time to think about the deeper themes and one of the cardinals giving a bland short speech about science and religion at the end of the movie isn't gonna cut it.
The movie is just really stupid.
They show us what the assassin looks like in the first 30 minutes of the film yet the camera still turns towards suspicion characters when Tom Hanks is looking for him. It doesn't happen very often that I root for the bad guy, especially one as bland as the assassin but all the characters are so stupid I was happy when some of them died. Nothing that was happening seemed logical, the characters pretty much could have been replaced by rocks. They might have been smarter that way.
Its awesome.
Despite running around for 5 hours Langdon doesn't even solve the mystery himself, he finds the key to a video recording that the chief of police had already discovered, inside the dying chiefs hand.
Pretty much the only good thing about this movie is that Ewan McGreggor, Stellan Skarsgård and Armin Mueller-Stahl are such awesome actors that even in shitty roles they manage to be awesome. I also enjoyed the pretty CGI explosion caused by an exploding canister of anti-matter. The movie was also a lot better paced than the DaVinci Code and let's say Wolverine, but that isn't saying much.
The bottom line is Angels and Demons is simply a bad movie. I hate to bring up the obvious but anyone interested at all in the story should just go read the book and not waste their time with this thrash.
-BeaverMoose
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