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Dir. Ron Howard
Rating: 4.1 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
The Catholic Church has obviously got to Dan Brown. How else to explain just how far out of their way he goes to excuse the Church and provide it with ample PR in the form of this dreary, nonsensical thriller -- Brown's sequel to the wildly successful Da Vinci Code. Again, director Ron Howard and author Brown see fit to drag Harvard Prof Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and his barely-perceptible quasi mullet to the Vatican, only this time it's to help the Church out in its hour of need. The pontiff has died, leaving a gathering of the Cardinals to elect a new pope, only four Cardinals have been kidnapped, supposedly by a centuries-old underground organization known as the Illuminati, hell-bent on revenge for the Church's persecution of scientists whose theories don't bend to the Catholic theology. Coincidentally, a small amount of extremely powerful anti-matter has been stolen out of a top-secret science facility, and has been placed, bomb-style, somewhere in Rome, set to detonate unless a fantastic amount of unspecified money is wired to the kidnappers. Helping Langdon out this go round is one of the anti-matter scientists, Vittoria (Ayelet Zurer), ostensibly to help diffuse the bomb when found, but mostly to echo every idea out of Langdon's head as absolutely dead-on right and to look fabulous in a tight black dress. In search of the missing Cardinals and the bomb, our heroes run pell-mell through Rome, always with Langdon making some obvious, cataclysmic observation that inevitably leads them right to the next clue. One of the trite tricks the film continuously serves us is whatever Langdon says happens to be dead on the money ("This is it!" he bellows confidently time and again) . So little time is wasted solving clues and riddles, it seems impossible that the secret location of the Illuminati hadn't been discovered for four hundred years and not by a illiterate six-year-old sheepherder. That's not the hardest part of this lackluster tripe to swallow, either. It is not giving away much to say that the kidnapping scheme is only but a small part of a larger -- absolutely, spot-on idiotic -- caper that turns everything on its head at the expense of any conceivable plausibility. As for the Church, they come across far more benevolent and wise than in Brown's previous novel, culminating in an absolutely embarrassing monologue about the power of the Church by the acting Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor) to the Cardinals deep in conclave. Not sense James Earl Jones asinine "the one constant is Baseball, Ray" speech in Field of Dreams has any mouthful of uttered dialogue rang as completely false and unjustified.
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