Thoughts on Angels & Demons

Posted by Colin Harvey May 30, 2009

Kate and I had free tickets for the cinema that had to be used, so we went to see Angels & Demons on Thursday afternoon. I'm not a huge Dan Brown fan --I got to page 76of TDVC before giving up— but Kate had been let down by her friend, so faced with my Dearly Beloved missing out, I bit the bullet and volunteered it as our freebie.

Actually, it wasn't as bad as I'd feared.

The reviews have --as far I've read-- generally portrayed a preposterous plot, wooden acting, and a lack of credibility with Robert Langham (Tom Hanks) as knowing too much.

In reverse order, well, duh, he’s an expert. That’s what experts are called in for – to know things. Had they called in a bricklayer, there might have been grounds for complaint. I suspect that this is just a backlash to the ‘Omnipotent CSIs’ scenario, where lab rats regularly display what is an unbelievable breadth of knowledge. But I don’t think that Ron Howard is guilty on that charge.

Nor was the acting that bad. Tom Hanks won’t win an Oscar, and the female eye-candy was, well, female eye-candy. But it’s an action film, not Philadelphia, and even if action films demand the same standard of acting as ‘proper’ films Stellen Skarsgard and Pierluigi Franco were competent, and Ewen MacGregor stole the show.

The plot was intricate, generally answering any “Hang on!” moments within a couple of scenes, and managed to genuinely surprise me on several occasions.

I think that the main problem with Angels & Demons is that it’s fallen foul of a couple of completely separate groups, both of whom have their own agendas. Maybe I’ll write more about that some time, but I think that that’s enough on A & D, at least for the moment.