Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: Angels & Demons

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they gather over Jesus wafers and wine to talk about it. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week, we’ll be discussing Angels & Demons, Ron Howard and Tom Hanks' second attempt at transforming Dan Brown's page turning nonsense into cinematic gold. The below discussion contains spoilers.

Next Week: S. Darko. Almost a decade later, Richard Kelly's cult classic Donnie Darko receives a sequel from people who had nothing to do with the original.

SPOILER ALERT! We reveal the secret to creation below.

Jeremiah: I read The Da Vinci Code for a class in college (oh kooky liberal arts education). I found it to be a grueling exercise in tedium, but I like the mystery solving, code breaking motif. Despite a serious Dan Brown disdain and a healthy dislike of Tom Hanks, I tried to enter Angels & Demons with an open mind.

I was rewarded, of course, with 2 and a half hours that redefined the word "tedium" for me. Rather than pick apart the many, many things wrong with A&D, lest this turn into an internet snark-a-thon, I'm going to offer some suggestions for how I think the movie could have been better.

First off, don't make your movie 2 and a half hours long. That's crazy. The ideal length for a crypto-thriller is about 100 minutes. You're giving us 50% more. That's not a good thing. Second, don't make your main antagonist a huge badass and then kill him indiscriminately in an explosion we're left to assume is the mastermind tying up loose ends. This nerdy looking killing machine is not only angling for a spot in the 00s Badass Tournament, he also appears to have been an early practitioner of gun kata. You're standing in the way of human progress, Opie.

Third, if your movie is largely going to revolve around a tour of churches in Rome, then structure it in a way that allows us to enjoy it. Make use of the majesty, grandeur and history. Give the characters, and the audience, time to explore and marvel at these wonders rather than having 50 scenes in which Hanks and that lady exchange inconsequential factoids while running up stairs. Also, don’t keep sending them back to the stupid Vatican. They’re in an impossibly tight race against time, they shouldn't keep running back to home base.

Fourth, don't make your movie not make sense. I was waiting the whole time for the Illuminati stuff to be revealed as a red herring. The problem is, all of the crimes and rhetoric are based on this highly esoteric Illuminati lore. If you're just trying to confuse people, why bother? Just send them the Illuminati card, say "path of enlightenment" and then do everything else without any pattern. Act crazy - even The Lone Rangers knew that.

And finally, next time, put Commandante Swiss Guard in charge. That guy figured out the whole thing and he barely left his office. Hanks was just holding him back.

There's clearly a reason Dan Brown didn't become a major literary star until The Da Vinci Code, because this story is actually way worse. It's a scavenger hunt with no code breaking and lots of planted-clue following. It's a glorified episode of The Amazing Race without the feeling of grandeur Da Vinci had, and frankly, I don’t care at all if the Catholic Church tears itself apart.

Thank god nothing important rests on this Langdon dude. He sucks.

Jeff: For some reason Jeremiah doesn’t want this to turn into an internet snark-a-thon, which I thought was the whole point of picking Angels & Demons (you’re welcome). With that in mind, I suppose I’ll just cram some of the snarky rhetorical questions I’ve been jotting down into this first incomprehensible paragraph. Was this movie shot in real time? Where did Ewan McGregor learn to fly a helicopter and, presumably, wire a car to explode? If they’d actually been allowed to film at the Vatican, how many times do you think Ron Howard would’ve had to stop shooting and ask someone to clear that naked little handcuffed boy from the set? Where’s Hooch?

Here’s a question that’s not meant to be funny:  did you know Akiva Goldsman was paid 3.8 million dollars to write this movie? Yeah. Chew on that, people with taste.

Look, last fall I used the phrase “fart-powered asshole brain” to describe Dan Brown. So you can probably gather that I’m not a big fan of his, and I dislike even more the capitalist scum that want to treat his work seriously because he managed to sell a billion units to all of the world’s gullible dimwits. With that said, unlike Jeremiah, I do enjoy Tom Hanks and I’m much more forgiving of time-wasting films than I am of time-wasting books. Oh, who am I kidding? I never gave Angels & Demons a chance. It’s a bloated, dull, pretentious mess that would’ve felt like slow torture if I hadn’t periodically allowed myself to doze off during its endless runtime.

To piggyback on something Jeremiah brought up, Robert Langdon has to be one of the most inept (not to mention uninteresting) protagonists in history. Without him around, the Swiss Guard dude probably keeps this whole mess in-house. But Langdon, whose symbology detective skills seem to fall into the same bumbling bullshit category as Independence Day Jeff Goldblum’s “cold…flu…virus…” alien-defeating epiphany, comes in and basically swallows every piece of bait Ewan puts out for him. He causes chaos and seems to make the situation worse, but I guess that’s all forgiven in the end because he managed to save the future pope from drowning. Who cares? Has there ever been such a milquetoast leading man?

I will agree with Jeremiah that the assassin was hugely badass. Too bad he only accounts for about 15 minutes of screen time. Speaking of badass, here’s another question for you: if you keep the same plot, but replace Robert Langdon with Indiana Jones, how does this movie change? This is one of the fantasies I had to engage in to make it through this dreck.

You're awesome. Why are you in this movie?

Ben: I too had a hard time staying focused. After I viewed this movie for the first time last summer, one of my friends and I had a thought provoking conversation. We didn’t debate the simultaneously opposing and intertwining relationship between religion and science, but whether or not dying by drowning or burning would be worse (I picked drowning, and I’m willing to really explore this further in the comments section if anyone is so inclined). And that’s kind of my point here.  This movie sucks, and these were the kind of things I mulled over during its impossibly long run time. Things I pondered during the second time I watched it: my desire to own a tarantula someday, whether I should eat the last piece of pizza or save it for part of my lunch on Monday, and my disdain for toenail polish.

I agree that the assassin is badass, and it sucks that he had no screen time, but I tend to think that even if he did the character would have been ruined by the uninspired writing and the all encompassing stink of this movie. Jeremiah has several good suggestions for how to improve Angels and Demons, but I don’t want it to be improved. These kind of tips will only help other writers perpetuate this pseudo history sleuth nonsense. So pipe down, Jeremiah. You're already responsible for the whole VH1 reality lineup!

I think Tom Hanks is an above average talent. He’s certainly serviceable as a leading man, and most directors would be more than enthused at the prospect of having him attached to one of their projects.  But I’ll be frank here; I’m not his biggest fan. I think he’s one of those actors who is done taking chances and that bores me. But for god's sake man, at least try. Half of the time in Angels and Da Vinci he sounds more like a tour guide for the audience than an actual character, just sort of dryly explaining things. This might be okay if he was narrating, but he’s not.

Even if Hanks would have put on a brilliant performance, even if the story would have been well thought out, I still think I would have come away from the movie feeling less than satisfied. These stories act as if they are so important, but they never really challenge anything. And every time it steps on the toes of any particular idea, it goes out of its way later on to play nice and reinforce that the church isn’t so bad, or what have you. The real secret is beneath all of the lengthy philosophical discussion, there isn’t much there. Dan Brown has found a way to mask page turning bullshit as profound literature, to make stupid people feel smart. For that, he shall live in a golden house for the rest of his days. And all the power to him, I guess.

Before I go, I’ll say something nice: Ewan McGregor really sucked ass in this movie. Huh, I screwed that up.

Go back to the heroin, Ewan.

Is Angels & Demons as much of a boring mess as we thought, or are you an inbred imbecile? Let us hear your thoughts below!

Next week: S. Darko