Bad Movies We Love: Angels & Demons

Despite some serious consideration by Movieline's blue-ribbon panel of camp aficionados, you will not find The Da Vinci Code in our deep, distinguished, and recently revived canon of Bad Movies We Love. It fell more into the less-auspicious Bad Movies We Can't Stay Awake Through, resulting in one hung jury after another. But its follow up Angels & Demons is a relative firecracker of a film, all pulp, pomp and grisly spectacle in the nerve center of the Catholic Church. For its sheer improvement over its predecessor, this one probably doesn't deserve BMWL enshrinement, either. But for its operatic treatment of Tom Hanks saving Rome, Vatican City and all of their faithful from annihilation in about six hours flat? Welcome to the club, boys!

The conventional wisdom going into Angels was that it would be hard to out-suck the original Da Vinci. And not just because of the first film's histrionics and conceptual bloat, but simply because Ron Howard is too good a director to take this kind of fall twice. Though a sequel was going to happen anyway (Da Vinci's quarter-billion dollar global gross required it), it behooved no one creatively to go back for seconds at novelist Dan Brown's Shit Smorgasboard. Aesthetic precautions were necessary.

Thus Howard and producer Brian Grazer enlisted screenwriter David Koepp, a sharper, livelier hired gun than Da Vinci's more cerebral, tin-eared scribe Akiva Goldsman. In the end, they share credit for a crisp but massive thriller that Howard stylistically hits out of the park. Which isn't to say it makes a whit of sense: The primary action takes place over roughly 24 hours, starting with the death of the Pope, the traditional breaking of his ring, and the calling of Conclave, during which the Church's cardinals congregate to elect a new pontiff. Except four of the leading delegates have been kidnapped, with the ancient, anti-Catholic cult the Illuminati claiming responsibility. At roughly the same time, by some graphically unusual means, someone kipes a batch freshly constructed antimatter from a Swiss lab -- the first of its kind, natch, and more combustible than any bomb ever built.

In short, it's an international, theo-nuclear crisis. Luckily, symbologist hero Robert Langdon (Hanks) has nothing going on but a few laps at the Harvard pool. The Vatican, still nursing a grudge about that whole Jesus's kids thing in Da Vinci, nevertheless sends a flunky to tap Langdon's formidable skill in decoding ancient symbols, codes and other phenomena. Off they go to Rome, then to Vatican City itself, where despite the "jurisdictional nightmare" on hand, Langdon and biophysicist Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) link the kidnappings and lab theft in about five minutes. And this is mere minutes before an Illuminati countdown that will claim the lives of the captive cardinals (one per hour) before the antimatter blows Vatican City -- and the masses anticipating a new Pope -- to hell at midnight.

It's deliriously stupid, implausible stuff, complicated and/or aided in equal turns by Vatican cop Stellan Skarsgard, old-school cardinal Armin Mueller-Stahl, deadly assassin Nikolaj Lie Kaas, and shifty, enigmatic young priest Ewan McGregor. His "camerlengo" -- the late Pope's right-hand man and acting head-of-state -- pulls off some of Angels' most spellbinding dramatic feats, not the least of which is breaking into Conclave for a sweeping, straight-faced monologue urging the cardinals to fight terror with "openness and truth." He is rebuffed, but his ambition is not; the viewer knows s/he has not seen the last of McGregor's choir-boy defiance.

Which reminds me: Take heart, Catholics! Angels & Demons is a trifle compared to the offense of The Da Vinci Code, featuring no appearance by Christ's extended family, and no self-flagellating, serial-killing priests. (At least not directly.) With the exception of a few kidnapping, torture, immolation and conspiracy subplots, the cinema has never had a more reverent portrait of the ancient rituals of Vatican City. There might be a few papal desecration issues, and some minor, bullet-riddled carelessness in the church archives, but other than that, you're OK. And over the course of his 130-minute scavenger hunt for the missing cardinals and antimatter, Langdon does improve enough at reading monuments and other random directional crap that he manages one rescue. But it turns out to be a pretty important one, and you owe him big time.

Moreover, we all owe Howard as well. After directing Da Vinci with one hand holding his nose and the other counting his money, he's born again with this material. His staging of one particular set piece in St. Peter's Square -- culminating in a death that really has no place in a PG-13 movie -- is especially impressive, and the consequences of mishandled antimatter are depicted in a CGI/live-action sequence as well-done as anything in Star Trek. It's just an all-around better movie, eschewing such Big Issues of science vs. religion for the more spry, sordid precision of popcorn intrigue. "Be careful," Langdon is warned late in the film. "These are men of God." To which Howard seems to reply: "Careful? Where's the fun in that?" Exactly.