Angels & Demons

[KLAXXON]

Tom Hanks and Ron Howard unite for their fourth pairing with this follow-up to THE DA VINCI CODE. Hanks returns to the role of Robert Langdon in this film based on ANGELS AND DEMONS, Dan Brown's first novel to feature the now-famous symbiologist.





You could mount a National Film Theatre season of trashy movies about troubles at the Vatican following the death of a pope: The Shoes of the Fisherman, Godfather Part III, Saving Grace, The Pope Must Die and, now, Angels & Demons, a sequel to The Da Vinci Code, though it is, in fact, based on an earlier Dan Brown novel.

A worried-looking Tom Hanks reprises his role of Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, who's called in by the Vatican police when four cardinals are abducted at the very moment they're about to be locked up in conclave to elect a new pope. It appears that the Illuminati, a secret society persecuted by the church in the 17th century for attempting to reconcile science and religion, is attempting a comeback. They intend to murder the cardinals at hourly intervals in bizarre ways in secret places all over Rome. At the climax, they'll release a canister of antimatter stolen from the Cern project in Switzerland, thus reducing the Holy See to dust.

Accompanied by beautiful Italian physicist Vittoria Vetra (Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer), Langdon works like Alan Turing on speed. Conducting a peripatetic seminar on iconography and symbology, he chases around Rome, gains access to the Vatican's secret archives and decrypts enigmatic clues that direct the local cops to concealed crypts where the cardinals are to be crucified in colourful conditions reminiscent of Theatre of Blood and Se7en.

The movie progresses with the smooth patter and rapid movements of a conman gulling tourists with a three-card trick on Sixth Avenue or Oxford Street and there are fewer of those expository moments in The Da Vinci Code, when we couldn't be sure who'd laugh first, the actors or the audience.

The British production designer Allan Cameron has done an impressive job recreating Vatican interiors. Cops and clerics fall to their deaths with a regularity that reminds us that Michelangelo Antonioni once wrote a collection of essays called That Bowling Alley on the Tiber. Ewan McGregor (Ulster priest becomes papal right-hand man), Armin Mueller-Stahl (smooth cardinal) and Stellan Skarsgård (boss of the Swiss Guard) share and spread the suspicion. The movie has its sacramental wafer and swallows it, thus delivering a controversial story that offends no one.

Something odd occurs at the very end of David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman's slick script, which may be a private joke, an arcane clue or desperation. At the conclusion of Robert Anderson's 1953 play Tea and Sympathy and its 1956 film version, a self-sacrificial Deborah Kerr says (while preparing to provide therapeutic sex to a self-doubting teenage virgin): "Years from now, when you talk about this, and you will, be kind."

After Langdon has saved the Vatican from a fate worse than Hades, a cardinal tells him, using the identical dramatic pauses: "When you write of us, and you will write of us, do so gently." Could the working title of Angels & Demons have been "See & Symbology"?










Tom Hanks ...  Robert Langdon
Ewan McGregor ...  Camerlengo Patrick McKenna
Ayelet Zurer ...  Vittoria Vetra
Stellan Skarsgård ...  Commander Richter
Pierfrancesco Favino ...  Inspector Olivetti
Nikolaj Lie Kaas ...  Assassin
Armin Mueller-Stahl ...  Cardinal Strauss
Thure Lindhardt ...  Chartrand
David Pasquesi ...  Claudio Vincenzi
Cosimo Fusco ...  Father Simeon
Victor Alfieri ...  Lieutenant Valenti
Franklin Amobi ...  Cardinal Lamasse
Curt Lowens ...  Cardinal Ebner
Bob Yerkes ...  Cardinal Guidera
Marc Fiorini ...  Cardinal Baggia (as Marco Fiorini)





Trailer


IMDB




Download Torrent

[aramboy]

Thank you so much. Great movie I want to see it again after watching it in the cinema.