When the first NATIONAL TREASURE movie came out, a lot of people thought it had been rushed into production to cash in on the Da Vinci Code book craze. Dan Brown’s book hadn’t been turned into a film yet and NATIONAL TREASURE seemed to be using the Da Vinci code blueprint – take a few historical “clues,” spin an elaborate conspiracy around them and voila! A Dan Brown knock-off, American history-style. NATIONAL TREASURE didn’t seem to take its “history” all that seriously, using it more as an excuse for an Indiana Jones-like adventure story than an exploration into a shadowy corner of our nation’s past. But hey, as silly as it was, it became a smash hit.

Dan Brown’s THE DA VINCI CODE seemed to take its “history” a lot more seriously, but when THAT movie came out, it too seemed to focus more on the action side of the equation than on the ideas behind the action. It’s the nature of movies, I suppose, and that nature is even more pronounced in the new movie ANGELS AND DEMONS. It might as well have been called INTERNATIONAL TREASURE.

This time out, it’s the Vatican that’s at risk. The Pope has died and a centuries-old secret society, the Illuminati, appears to be re-emerging as a credible threat to the Catholic Church. The Illuminati were a collection of scientists and artists who were violently suppressed by the Church for using science as a challenge to church doctrine. Forced underground, the Illuminati supposedly counted luminaires like Galileo and Bernini among its members. ANGELS AND DEMONS posits that the Illuminati may be back with a vengeance, a modern day terrorist group.

All this historical unearthing is actually quite interesting and allows us to take part in a kind of historical tour of Rome and Vatican City. The problem is the movie doesn’t trust the inherent interest this kind of historical detective work can have for an audience and so tricks up all manner of “cliffhangers” to hold our attention. It turns history (and a history of ideas, no less) into a Vatican City game show, a not-so-amazing race against time. It’s BEAT THE CLOCK, Vatican-style.

ANGELS AND DEMONS creates an unnecessarily artificial sense of tension by imposing some ridiculous time constraints on its protagonist. Not content to allow Tom Hanks to carefully stitch together a series of historical and symbolic clues into a plausible story, like any good detective and/or historian would do, the movie demands he also be 24’s Jack Bauer. But even Bauer gets a full 24 hours to crack the case. Hanks gets a lot less than that.

First off, we a ticking time bomb (okay, it’s actually unstable “anti-matter” caught in a tube) that’s set to go off at midnight. Hanks and company have to find the antimatter hidden somewhere in Vatican City and defuse it in just a few hours. And if that isn’t pressure enough, four cardinals have been kidnapped and will be executed in ghoulish fashion – one each hour – in the hours leading up to the midnight bomb going off. And of course, each execution will take place in different hidden locations. That means Hanks spends most of the movie breathlessly putting together obscure clues and racing around Rome desperately trying to rescue
one doomed cardinal after another. The film is littered with shots of classic Roman clocks whose minutes are relentlessly ticking away – ooh, ooh, it’s almost 9 o’clock! Hurry Tom, hurry! Oh no, it’s almost 10 o’clock, will he make it in time this time??? Okay, how about 11? And then, in the midst of all this, as if Hanks doesn’t already have enough on his desperation plate, he gets trapped in a sealed Vatican archive library where the oxygen has been cut off!!! What’s a symbologist to do? Hurry, hurry, hurry!

Like that awful Al Pacino movie 88 MINUTES, ANGELS AND DEMONS keeps reminding us just how little time our hero has left. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

By the time we get to the film’s climax, it feels like we’re on the climax # 73. So how can it possibly top the other 72? Can the movie really raise the ante yet again? I won’t ruin the surprise but I will say it involves a helicopter and is so laughably preposterous I found myself wishing for the the relatively grounded reality of NATIONAL TREASURE.

It’s safe to say I’ve completely lost my faith in Dan Brown movies.