Tis the season for Dan Brown, what with his forthcoming sequel to The Da Vinci Codeand the filmic version of Angels and Demons. Don’t get me wrong – I rushed to see the movie, if only because the DVC movie was so much better than the book and because friends had insisted I must read Angels and Demons but I couldn’t countenance any more of the author’s stodgy prose.
The film version of Angels and Demons, directed by the master of grand entertainment, Ron Howard, rightfully ignores the fact that it should predate DVC. Like a fireball, it begins fast and never slows down. For that is Dan Brown’s great secret – his plotting is immaculate. The movie opens with a scene straight from a Spiderman movie, the theft of some antimatter, but never mind, we switch over to symbologist Robert Langdon (played with gusto by Tom Hanks), rushed by helicopter to the Vatican, where three potential new Popes (the existing Holiness has died) have just been kidnapped. And the kidnapper will kill one prelate candidate each hour and then, at midnight, just hours away, will unleash the power of antimatter to destroy the Holy City. Throw in a female scientist chasing her missing antimatter, the former Pope’s treasured assistant (Ewan McGregor charms the pants off us), suspicious-looking Cardinals, suspicious-looking policemen, and an unstoppable bad guy . . . and the stage is set for screeching tyres, exotic locations, deciphered clues, grisly deaths and a countdown that builds and builds and builds.
Got that? This movie works just as a thriller should, generating tension without pause, never proferring an illogical step, peopled by plausible folks, and containing a puzzle that makes for twists that delight. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute.
Then Angels and Demonsfinished and I had to talk about it and the experience diminished minute by minute. Unlike the truly superlative thrillers, Dan Brown lives on the screen and nowhere else. It’s pap but hi-jinx pap.
I did notice one interesting aspect of Dan Brown film #2. Unlike #1, which incited controversy by messing with religious history, #2 takes great care, undue care really, to neither offend nor titillate Catholics. Will that mean less box office success? We shall see.