Angels and Demon’s Review
Please note that I’m going to spoil the plot here, so don’t read on if you care about that.
I’ve never read any of the Dan Brown books. “The Da Vinci Code” has been in my “to read” pile now for about 5 years and I just haven’t read it. There’s no real reason for this other than the fact that I’ve just had other books I’ve wanted to read. I’ve heard that some people love these books and I’ve also met people who give a hearty “harrumph” every time Brown’s books are mentioned. What may have swung me to not reading the books is that the Harrumphers (Which I think is a word I just made up) are usually people who’s opinions I trust, where as the people who loved the books are people who I usually disagree with on what constitutes “good”.
A while back I did actually see the TDC movie and my overall opinion of it was, meh. I didn’t think it was bad and there was some lovely camera work, but it just didn’t enthral me. Tom Hank’s was quite good as the lead character Prof. Langdon and Ian Mackellen did a decent job as the traditional eccentric British Old Man™ that has graced films for decades. It’s been a while since I watched the film, but at the time it just didn’t do it for me. I’d probably sit through it again but it would be if I was stuck in a hotel room on a Sunday afternoon and it just happened to be in the hotel’s DVD collection, you know?
I actually saw Angels and Demons before I saw TDC and, at the time, I kind of liked it. It didn’t rock my world or anything but I appreciated it. This is a movie I would actually choose to watch under less duress (Poet, didn’t know it)
We recently got a Blu Ray Player, so I’ve been picking up some Blu Ray’s that I thought would make the most of the set up. I’ve bought The Hobbit and Blade Runner, which are two films I have never seen and thought I’d try them out and I also picked up Angels and Demons off Amazon for £8. I ultimately plumped for this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I hadn’t seen it in a while and wanted to see if I still liked it. Secondly, I recalled the movie having a lot of sumptuous shots of Rome and The Vatican, which would no doubt look nice in glorious HD. Thirdly; my mum likes Dan Brown and had never seen the film, so I imagined she’d like a chance to see it.
After watching it again, I still enjoyed it but on a second viewing there are a lot of things about the story that I don’t like, that I didn’t really notice the first time around. I should mention that there are two versions of the movie on the Blu Ray Disc. There’s the Theatrical version and the extended version. I watched the Theatrical version. There may be bits on the extended version that address some of my problems with the movies overall plot. I went with the Theatrical version though because this is the version most people would have seen and I also wanted a viewing experience that was true to the first time I saw the movie, so my eventual viewpoint would be balanced. If any big fans out there have seen the extended version and think there’s anything in it that counter acts any points I make in my review, go stuff yourself! I keed, I keed! Feel free to comment and I’ll take it on board.
To lay out the basic plot for you, the story begins with the much loved Pope dying of a stroke. The Cardinals are in the process of trying to elect a new Pope when disaster strikes, as the four leading Cardinals in the Papal Race are kidnapped. Enter our hero Professor Langdon, played by Tom Hanks playing Tom Hanks. He’s a bit tetchy with The Vatican as they won’t let him into their precious archives. He’s writing a career defining book but needs to view one of the texts that The Vatican have stored to complete it. However, he is invited to help with the search for the cardinals due to the possibility of The Illuminati being involved; a subject which he knows a lot about.
So far, so good. We are soon introduced to his sexy accomplice (I believe this is a common theme with Dan Brown books) who is played by Ayelet Zurer. She’s a researcher from the Hadron Collider in Cerne. Her research partner was killed and a tube of anti matter was stolen. To both our main characters horror, not only have the cardinals been cardinal-napped but the container holding the anti-matter is stashed away somewhere in The Vatican and will explode at Midnight! Cue running around Vatican City for 2 hours trying to find the cardinals and stop the bomb going off!
Now, as a plot, that’s quite good. The idea works quite well. Hanks enters a dry yet firm performance and the supporting cast who put this story together are equally strong. The problem with the plot is that it just tries to be too cute at times and really does shoe-horn a twist at the end, when a twist isn’t needed. The actual story of Hanks using his super special sign decoding abilities to try and locate the cardinals is a good one. What makes it even better is that they don’t turn Hanks into a completely infallible genius. Yes, he does eventually get the locations right but he’s usually always 1 or 2 steps behind the killer, so it’s normally too late to be much good.
The first time he tries to find a Cardinal, he gets the location wrong, pretty much damning the poor man to death. The death scenes for the Cardinals are all well done and suitably gruesome. They are all branded with one of the four elements (Earth, Fire, Wind, Water) and then killed in relation to that theme. For example, Cardinal number one is branded with “Earth” and is then filled with soil. A horrid yet thematically pleasing death, I think we can all agree. In fact, all 3 of the first cardinals die, but every time Hanks gets a little bit closer to saving them until he finally gets it right on the fourth one. I like that a lot because the film makes Hanks earn his success. He has to work at it and fail a few times before finally succeeding on the last Cardinal. That bit of the plot gets thumbs up from me.
Sadly, the plot starts to get silly and convoluted at this point. It comes to light that The Pope was actually, *gasp*, murdered! E gads! This news leads the Pope’s aid, played by Ewan McGregor, to decide to clear out the whole of Vatican City until peace is restored. The Cardinals, led by Armin Mueller-Stahl, stubbornly refuse and also refuse to clear St Peter’s Square. This is one of the bits in the film that really costs it credibility. Mueller-Stahl’s main reason for not evacuating is, and I paraphrase here, “We’re all going to go to heaven anyway, so it doesn’t matter if we die”. What? Now I know that the higher ups in the Catholic Church have a reputation for being a bit odd sometimes, but there is no way that a leading Catholic Cardinal would condemn and entire square full of innocent Catholics to death in that manner. I’m all for suspending my disbelief and everything, but that’s a pretty big jump to take. I just don’t buy that Mueller-Stahl would be that cold, nor that extreme. This is The Vatican we’re talking about here, not Al-Qaeda.
Still, I can accept this for the sake of drama (There’s less at stake if there isn’t a square full of people who can die in a blazing inferno of death™ so I’ll be a bit lenient). Ewan McGregor has what I consider to be the best acting performance in the film. I really like his portrayal of the character, at least until the final act when it gets silly. For most of the film he plays a quiet and thoughtful character, whose only motivation is seemingly to stop everyone dying in a horrific explosion. It’s quite hard to dislike a character with that motivation to be fair. It’d be like disliking a character who wants to stop puppies being drowned or a character who wants to prevent the spread of AIDS by letting people wear condoms (SATIRE!)
Ewan is made to look like a dedicated Catholic and an all around good egg. We’re informed that he was orphaned at a young age and the Pope adopted him. It’s also revealed that he learnt to fly helicopters while undertaking his military service (Could this become important later? Hmmm, we’ll have to see). As you can imagine, this whole Pope dying thing has upset him a tad, and the fact there’s a bomb due to vaporise The Vatican and a large chunk of Rome as well, really has made this the wrong week for him to quit smoking.
The movie eventually introduces us to our lead villain who is an unnamed assassin played by Nikolaj Lie Kaas. There’s deliberate mystery behind the character and Kaas plays him with a cold detachment that makes him both un-nerving but also not that memorable. They immediately try to make you think he’s all mysterious and professional by showing him having money wired from whoever is hiring him to a super duper secret bank account, on the Isle of Man. Seriously? The Isle of Man? Since when did deadly assassins stop putting their blood money into Swiss banks? Has the credit crunch hit that hard that he had to get an account on the Isle of Man instead? I mean, at least give him an account in Monaco to give him a bit of Bondesque street cred.
So anyway, Kaas is alright as a villain and they try and give him a bit of character depth by insinuating that he only kills people he has been told to kill or people who are armed. This explains why he doesn’t just sneak up and shoot Tom Hanks in the head, which would be advisable considering the fact that he’s TRYING TO UNDO HIS EVIL PLANS! The assassin and Tom Hanks eventually have a big face off where the assassin simply tells him not to follow him, otherwise he’ll shoot him. Hanks doesn’t follow him, because his character isn’t an idiot, and the assassin lets him go and save Ewan McGregor from supposed danger.
It should be noted that Hanks and Zurer run right past Kaas at one point on route to saving Macgregor and he doesn’t care. THIS ASSASSIN IS TERRIBLE AT HIS JOB. Tom Hanks had seen his face and could possibly identify him yet he still lets him run off to save the day. If I’d paid Kaas for this assassin job, I’d want my money back! It should also be noted that Kaas is sent an email telling him that a get away vehicle is waiting for him. Everyone and his brother can clearly see that this car is going to explode once he turns the key in the ignition and, low and behold, the car blows up. I mean, I was practically yelling at the TV at the assassin not to turn the car on and he still does it and it still blows him to smithereens. Good riddance to bad assassin is what I say. You wouldn’t catch Ezio Alditore falling for that one.
I do feel a little harsh on Kaas here as he does the best with the part that has been written for him. When his character is coldly killing people, he does have a genuine menace to his actions. Everything he does is both clinical and also exerts that kind of melancholic ease that only a cold blooded European Assassin can provide. It would have worked better if he was just a killer, killing people who got in his way, rather than trying to give him a warped sense of ethics. This sort of character doesn’t need that kind of development. He’s a hired gun, hired to do a job. He’s also got his own liberty to think of. If you were an assassin and someone was getting dangerously close to ruining your plans, you’d bump the guy off using your mad assassin skillz (the “z” makes it cooler) to ensure that he couldn’t, I don’t know, RUIN YOUR EVIL PLAN!
Now it already takes a leap to accept that they wouldn’t just empty the square when the bomb threat came through, and they had video proof of the bomb. Add to that the fact that the assassin is letting our protagonist live for no other reason that he doesn’t seem to care about doing his job properly, then the plot hole sharks are starting to circle this movies drowning narrative as it thrashes away in the story sea.
So anyway, I mentioned that Hanks and Zurer are rushing back to The Vatican to save McGregor from his impending doom. This doom is in the form of our other main character, head of the Swiss Guard and general old grumpy man in a suit, Commander Richter, played by Stellen Skarsgard. Skarsgard is openly hostile to Hanks from the minute he shows up and spends a large part of the film scoffing at his ideas. He’s your run of the mill sour authority figure, who spends the movie barking at anyone within a 1 mile radius.
As the movie progresses, it begins to tease is that Skarsgard may be our villain of the piece. It is revealed that Zurer’s research partner kept a journal. A very thorough one it would seem, so thorough in fact that it might hold clues to his murderer. Skarsgard steals the journal and locks it in his Bond Villain style drawer in desk (You know, one of those ones that slides out so it no longer looks like it’s actually part of the desk and also has a computer monitor in it). This prompts Zurer to ask “what are you hiding?” to which he replies “What are you hiding?”. Well, considering that she left the journals out in the open, in an unlocked drawer, I would say she was pretty much hiding nothing in that regard. She couldn’t have done a worse job of hiding those journals, if that was her plan.
Throughout the movie they continue to build drama between Skarsgard and McGregor’s character. McGregor eventually cracks and orders a full evacuation of the square, along with a helicopter for the Cardinals. Skarsgard countermands the order and then locks himself in the office with McGregor for some Good Ol’ Fashioned Swiss Guard Priest Killin’™ (Or so it would seem)
Hanks and Zurer get to The Vatican just in time to get the door to the office broken down. McGregor is on the floor, branded with the symbol of two keys in the shape of an X , while Skarsgard is standing above him with a gun. Naturally, the guards shoot and kill him instantly, rather than capturing and killing him. Another priest runs in and leaps across the room to strangle McGregor. Again, rather than pulling the priest off Macgregor and taking him away for questioning, the guards shoot him dead. But don’t worry friends; the nonsense has only just started!
Hanks, Zurer and McGregor find the bomb but there isn’t enough time to diffuse it. By this point the helicopter has landed outside The Vatican. Oh if only there was a priest somewhere in the vicinity to the bomb who knew how to fly a helicopter! Praise the Lord for Deus Ex Machina!
So yes, McGregor takes the bomb, flies the helicopter to a safe distance, and then parachutes to safety while the helicopter explodes in a brilliant show of light. The Vatican is saved and it looks like The Cardinals are going to vote McGregor in as Pope. But then the twist kicks in. Remember the Bond Villain desk? Skarsgard’s last act is to pass Hanks a mysterious key. This is, of course, the key to the Bond Desk. While Zurer fiddles with the desk to find the journals, the mysterious TV screen presents itself and wouldn’t you know it, the key Hanks has is for the TV screen. The TV screen has recorded what really happened in the office and, in a completely unnecessary storyline twist; it turns out that our lad Ewan was the bad guy all along!
His reason for such villainy? He can’t bloody stand science that’s why! The scientists were experimenting in Cerne to try and create the “God Particle”. The Pope thought this was a good idea as it would scientifically prove that God existed. McGregor disagreed and murdered him, with the ultimate goal of a much stronger and anti science Pope like himself taking over. Hanks rats the now evil McGregor out to the Cardinals who sick The Swiss Guard on him. McGregor decides it would be a better idea to just kill himself and he does so in brutal fashion. The movie ends with the Cardinal who Hanks saved becoming Pope. Hanks, due to saving the Pope and all, is finally given the material he needs to finish his book, provided he agrees to leave it back to the Vatican in his will.
Angels and Demons is a film that I was enjoying just fine before the pointless twist at the end. Sure, there are quite a few plot holes in the story at times, but the film also kind of earns these plot holes because it needs them for the story to actually have something at stake. We need to have the square full of people because it puts more pressure on our heroes to save the day. The reasons why the people are in the square don’t really make sense and they really have to make The Cardinals look pretty cold and uncaring to pull it off, but you are prepared to let it go in order to progress the story.
All the Deus Ex Machina things make a bit more sense with the twist ending, which is one of the positives about it. The fact that the helicopter is there makes sense because McGregor orders it personally, which plays into his plans.
I honestly think that this movie would have been a better film if they had just had McGregor save the day and then perish in the helicopter. Everything else from that point could still happen. They could have still elected the surviving Cardinal as The Pope and Hanks could have still got his book. I actually like how the ending would be much more a downer too. The twist ending just has a forced feeling of triumph about it.
The twist ending does tie up a number of loose ends and they do their best to make it fit the plot, but I just don’t buy it. At no point do we see if McGregor is doing this on his own or whether he has help. If he is doing it on his own, then I don’t believe he could, no matter how much I suspend my disbelief. If he has help, why don’t we explore that part of it more? Sure, he hires Kaas’s assassin, but does he put the bomb in Kaas’s car? Does McGregor’s character even have the knowledge to place a bomb in a car like that? Did he hire someone to do it? I actually think this is quite important. If you’re going to have a car bomb go off to conveniently kill a character you need out of the way for plot reasons, I think you need to earn it through a proper explanation. The writers here don’t earn it. They just say “oh there’s a bomb in the car” and leave it at that. Come on, you could at least have McGregor have a throw away line like “I’m not the only person to feel this way” to at least tease that he might have had some help at some point.
Surprisingly, despite complaining about this film for nearly 3,500 words. I do quite like it. I enjoyed watching it and, as mentioned before, I would watch it again. Rome and The Vatican look lovely in HD and the main characters hit most of the marks they’re supposed to. You could argue that some of the characters are a bit simplistic at times, but I actually don’t think that’s a problem. A character can have a simple motivation so long as they own it and aren’t afraid to chase it at every turn. The problems arise when you start trying to give a simple character extra depth when extra depth isn’t required. All of the characters in this film are better when they follow their basic principles and motivations. Kaas is best when he’s an assassin coldly killing people for a pay cheque, McGregor is best when he’s trying to keep people safe from the bomb and Skarsgard is best when he’s stomping around and sneering about how this poncy “sign reading” stuff is a load of old knackers.
Up to the ending, this film was hovering around a 6.5/7.0 out of 10. However, the ending drags it all the way down to 5.0. I’m all for a twist now and then, but there has to be a reason for it. This film would have been much better with a straight regular ending. The twist is honestly there for the sake of having one. It doesn’t enrich the story or make it more enjoyable. It’s a forced “happy” ending when one just isn’t required.
Final Score 5 out of 10
Conclusion:
I’m not going to tell you not to see this film. If you’re prepared to accept what it is, you’ll be able to enjoy it. I’ll be honest and say I did enjoy it but that still doesn’t mean it’s a critical success. There are a number of movies that I enjoyed that completely fall down when you try to critically analyse them. The question is would you want to spend 2 hours of your life with these characters? At the end of the day, I answered yes. The movie will hold your attention. Its story flaws drag it down in my opinion, but they didn’t drive me to turn on the film entirely. While the flaws mean that this isn’t a good movie, they don’t make it without worth. Hence the rating being bang in the middle of the spectrum.
I hope you enjoyed this review. I apologise for the absurd length of it. This is the first time I’ve ever tried doing a film review. If I do anymore in the future, I’ll try and chop the length down. Please feel free to let me know what you didn’t like in this and offer some improvements.
If you’ve made it all the way here, thanks for reading!
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