These meticulously scheduled calamities are a rather mixed bag. The only hope is for Langdon and his latest platonic playmate, a physicist named Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), to uncover and retrace the 'Path of Illumination,' a secret trail upon whose steps the on-the-hour crimes will unfold. If this weren't enough, the battery keeping the wad of antimatter stable in its container will wear out exactly one hour after they run out of cardinals, causing an explosion vast enough to annihilate the Vatican and some of surrounding Rome. The Illuminati promise to kill one cardinal per hour beginning at 8 p.m. These are the preferiti, the candidates considered most likely to succeed the just-deceased Pope-whom everyone in the movie thinks died of a stroke, but everyone who's seen a movie will immediately recognize was murdered.

In addition to stealing a freshly baked canister of antimatter (a.k.a., the 'God particle') from a local super-collider-yes, this film takes physics as lightly as its predecessor did metaphysics-Illuminati agents have also kidnapped four cardinals. Said elders request Langdon's help in the Vatican City because he (literally) wrote the book on the Illuminati, an ancient, pro-science sect that was driven underground by Church persecution but has now resurfaced in an exceptionally foul mood. Though the Dan Brown novel on which the movie is based predated its billion-selling sibling, it has been lightly re-worked here into a sequel, essentially through the addition of knowing, wary glances between Langdon and Church elders every time their mutual 'history' is raised. Where The Da Vinci Code concerned itself with a nefarious plot undertaken by the Catholic Church, Angels & Demons tells the story of a plot against the Catholic Church, thereby depriving itself of perhaps a hundred million dollars' worth of free, controversy-related marketing. The movie never quite recovers from its loss. I'm unlikely ever to watch the film again, but if I were to, it would be for the hair.įor Angels & Demons, Hanks's character, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, has returned, but without the mullet, which in the interim evidently detached itself from his scalp, crawled off to some dark corner, and grew up to be Danny McBride.

Slipshod and plodding though that film was, the mullety muss adorning Hanks's pate was a source of nearly inexhaustible amusement. How do you make a sequel to a blockbuster when the star of your film declines to return for a second go-round? I refer, of course, to Tom Hanks's hairdo in The Da Vinci Code.

Da vinci code and angels and demons