Angels & Demons (2009, 138 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808151/
It's been a long time since I've seen a first-run movie in a theater. Angles & Demons gets the honor of being that movie.
The film, based on Dan Brown's novel, follows Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) as he tries to uncover the clues to a plot to kill the acting Pope (Camerlengo Patrick McKenna played by Ewan McGregor). Helping him along the way is Dr. Vittoria Vetra (Ayelut Zurer) along with some other church officials.
While I didn't read the book, I can say that this movie fails at providing suspense. Everything is "Hollywood last minute" but it completely fails at making me excited for pretty much anything. Once we know the first Cardinal is dead and the group didn't save him, we know the others will be, too. Sure, this isn't true of the last one, but Langdon actually sees the Assassin (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) push him into the water so we know Langdon will save him. The feeling that the group will actually solve something in time is completely lacking. Besides this, the acting as a whole was sub par and I really didn't care for any character to succeed in their goals.
However, the biggest failure is the stupid plot. It's absolutely ridiculous. Here's some questions that I had after watching this movie: What was the point of Ayelut Zurer's character Dr. Vittoria Vetra? She did absolutely nothing in the film. Did Camerlengo McKenna really conduct this elaborate plot to save the Vatican so that he could be Pope? Wouldn't something else have worked? Why did he try and kill Langdon when he needed him to solve this puzzle? The plot was really shaky at best.
The ending of the movie was also disappointing. The fact that the ending turned all the characters around so that good was bad and bad was good was terrible. This could've been fine had there been hints that these characters had these intentions before but Camerlengo McKenna was portrayed as essentially all good while the other church officials were portrayed as essentially all evil. I no doubt imagine that the book handled this "twist" much better by making the characters less one dimensional.
Overall, I gave this film a 3/10. It's watchable and sometimes it's actually enjoyable. But these moments are short lasting. The plot is so pathetically constructed and the ending is so lacking that the movie suffers immensely.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment