Dumb Finale Dooms Angels & Demons to Damnation
When I heard actor Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard had agreed to make a follow-up to The Da Vinci Code I can’t exactly claim to being excited. Notwithstanding the fact author Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons is a prequel not a sequel to that 2006 abomination (which, nonetheless, was a massive worldwide smash), I just felt like the duo sleepwalked through things the first time around, and any chance this was going to be anything other than more of the same a distant possibility to my mind.
Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer save the Catholic Church in Sony Pictures' Angels & Demons
While it is nice to be proven wrong, I still can’t exactly recommend this further adventure of academic symbologist Robert Langdon (Hanks) to anyone other than the novel’s rabid fan base. While both actor and director seem to be more than up to the challenge to prove they're fully engaged to the project this time around, the film is still undone by a last twenty or so minutes so horrible they’re downright comical.
Still, for two hours I was willing to look past obvious shortcomings and hammy happenstance and admit to being adequately entertained. There is a zippy efficiency to Akiva Goldsman (I Am Legend) and David Koepp’s (Ghost Town) streamlined adaptation. It has a hot-button immediacy that’s compelling, and even though I knew how absurd it all was I still felt the need to keep watching anyhow. Howard achieves a breathless pace that’s stimulating, and even though the constantly ticking clocks got a little old I was still curious to discover how all this religiously-fueled absurdity was going to play itself out.
What’s nice is that the film actually comes to the perfect coda. Sure it’s (almost hysterically) unbelievable, but I’d be lying through my teeth if I didn’t say it was still freakishly satisfying. Langdon manages to figure out what’s been going on from the beginning, his female sidekick (a charming Ayelet Zurer) gets to finally do something worthwhile and the head religious figure (a fine, if slightly disinterested, Ewan McGregor) gets to potentially martyr himself in front of all of Vatican City. It’s a thrilling turn of events, and while it still features plot holes big enough to carry ten thousand replica copies of the original Ten Commandments through the whole thing is so breathtaking I simply didn’t care.
Problem is, this isn’t the ending of the movie, not by a long shot. There are still another full twenty or so minutes to go, and to say Angels & Demons falls completely to pieces would be a disservice to all things that ever fell to pieces. Simply put, what worked (sort of, anyway) in a book doesn’t come close to doing so in a motion picture. The entire last act is twisty for the sake of being twisty, everything that came before a two-hour red herring totally superfluous to the actual denouement.
Worse, everything I was willing to gloss over before this foolish climax took place suddenly comes to the forefront, all of the dramatic missteps and plot deficiencies now looking the size of an oceanic cruise ship. It’s unintentionally hysterical, and by the time fire was set inside the Vatican and flashbacks upon flashbacks were levied to try and make sense of it all I couldn’t help but audibly groan.
What’s even sadder is I wasn’t the only one. I could actually feel the energy dissipate inside the movie theater, a semi-satisfied audience now making the rumblings and grumblings of a mass of viewers angry they’d just been sold a bill of goods long past their expiration date. If this had been a live performance, tomatoes would have been thrown onto the stage, nothing of merit that came before able to dispel the utter distaste of the horrifically putrid climax.
I’m not going to give a plot synopsis. For one thing, the masses who read Brown’s novel don’t need one. For another, those who didn’t should let themselves be relatively surprised by the mystery Langdon attempts to decipher. Just know that the Catholic Church is in trouble and that they have to turn to the last man on the planet they’d rather like to in order to solve it, all of Vatican City in danger of being blown to smithereens by villains claiming to be members of the long though defunct Illuminati.
You might think I’m being overly harsh but trust me when I say I’m not. In spite of my distaste for The Da Vinci Code, I was more than willing to give Angels & Demons the benefit of the doubt. After the first two hours, I was even ready to give it a hearty recommendation.
But nothing can erase the bad taste of that finale, things derailing so spectacularly it would have taken divine intervention to make it even slightly palatable. This movie, sadly, is a lost cause, the only mystery worth deciphering being just how such a despicably dumb conclusion could force such a once promising adventure to eternal cinematic damnation. What a waste.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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