.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

It's hard to believe that on Ron Howard's resume that The Da Vinci Code is his most successful film - based on box office receipts. Here's a director that has brought award winning films such as Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind and Frost/Nixon to the big screen, rolling out hit after hit. But it was his vision of the Dan Brown novel The Da Vinci Code that brought over three quarters of a billion dollars of audience cash to the register.

With a potential franchise on their hands (Dan Brown is prepping to release the third book of the series in September), it is no surprise that the studio wanted to bring Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon back again in Brown's prequel Angels & Demons.

And that is just what they did. But not without major changes first. Maybe the biggest change is that the book is a prequel to The Da Vinci Code, but Angels & Demons plays as a sequel. Guess that allowed for them to cut Hank's ridiculously ridiculed hair from the first film and accept it as just a maturing thing. This allowed them to make casual reference to why Langdon is not endeared to the Catholic Church.
Also differing from the original text is in many parts of the final reels and other character amalgamations. Details on each should be explored rather than explained so I will just skip over this point with the initial statement.

When The Da Vinci Code (the movie) was released in 2006, I knew of the book. Anyone who was alive in 2006 knew of the book. It didn't lure me to buy and read the pages, but on trains, planes and buses everywhere, The Da Vinci Code was always covering someone's face (this mantle has since been passed to the four Twilight series books). Hell, my girlfriend even went out and bought the paperback which soon took over from the Hop on Pop and Cat in the Hat series that normally sat on the nightstand gathering dust. I figured that if I got too lost, I could just ask her any questions.

But I didn't need to know the pages to enjoy the movie. Panned almost universally by critics (it received only a 24% approval rating from critics on rottentomatoes.com), most reviews spent time criticizing how the movie differed from the intensity of the novel. I wasn't at a disadvantage by not caring to read the piece and I rated the film a solid, if unspectacular, 3.5 out of 5 stars. Angels & Demons was hailed as a better book, so I entered the screening with the expectations of a better movie.

Angels & Demons brings our 21st Century Religious Indiana Jones, Robert Langdon back again after the Pope dies and the four likely candidates begin being murdered every hour. The killer or killers lead Langdon and the church to believe that the Illuminati (an ancient and thought defunct brotherhood that has long been at odds with the Catholic church) are responsible and they work through unbelievable and implausible events in unearthing the truth and the face behind the criminal acts. Heightening the tension is some anit-matter than has been stolen by the Illuminati and is threatened to destroy most of Vatican City.

As everything takes place in less than a 24 hour period across two countries, the pace if frantic. Langdon hardly gets to decipher one symbolic clue when a cardinal is killed and he is running onto the next. How he gets around the crowded streets in Rome while racing to deduce the clues left at each location would make Jack Bauer proud. But for audiences, it will leave them with a sense of "that's impossible", and anyone that has ever tried to get through crowded Italy when there is only the general chaos of day-to-day activity would know that it is "very impossible" that Langdon and the others could so quickly shift from one Religious location to another in less than 60 minutes.

Putting this logic aside, the movie was fairly entertaining even if a bit outlandish. Hanks does a good job with the Langdon character, but it doesn't rank as a highlight on his resume. The Langdon role could easily have been Nick Cage or even Tom Selleck for that matter.

Ewan McGreggor plays a large role as Camerlengo Patrick McKenna, and actually outshines the award winning Hanks in many of their scenes. Unfortunately, the ending takes much away from the character in terms of believability.

As with most sequels it is almost impossible not to compare and it is in the humble opinion of this reviewer that the two films are equal on entertainment value. They both throw a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo at the average audience viewer and New Testament references in The Da Vinci Code are replaced by the Catholicism positions in Angels & Demons. As a whole, the two films are equal. Equally entertaining and equally missing the mark. For let's face it - you put Hanks in front of the camera with Howard behind it, you should be knocking it out of the park like a 2002 Barry Bonds at bat.