{"id":239,"date":"2009-05-30T18:30:47","date_gmt":"2009-05-30T08:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=239"},"modified":"2009-06-22T17:40:16","modified_gmt":"2009-06-22T07:40:16","slug":"angels-and-demons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=239","title":{"rendered":"Angels and Demons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Angels and Demons<\/em> is a sequel to The Da Vinci Code<\/em>, a theology themed action film revisiting the exploits of Robert Langdon, a college professor who studies symbols and solves thousand-year old theological mysteries in his spare time.<\/p>\n

We start off this time with the death of the pope followed by a secret cardinal agent visiting Langdon, inviting him to fly to Vatican City to help find four kidnapped pontiffs who were all front-runners to become the new pope.\u00a0 They also have to race against the clock to find a destructive ball of ‘anti-matter’ which will blow up Vatican city.<\/p>\n

Angels and Demons<\/em> closely follows the template of the first film.\u00a0 There are short bursts of action interspersed with clunky dialogue explaining the story to the audience.\u00a0 While they never quite break the fourth wall and look directly at the camera, the dialogue is never character driven.\u00a0 Instead, the actors stand around describing the plot to the audience in case they can’t follow.\u00a0 It also has some deeply subtle fore-shadowing too.\u00a0 Ewan McGregor, playing a priest, just happens to tell Tom Hanks that he has a pilot’s license for no real reason at all.\u00a0 Not long after, the plot dictates that McGregor needs to get away from the Vatican by flying a helicopter.\u00a0 Amazing.<\/p>\n

The unseen villains in the film plan to execute a priest every hour at a different church located around Vatican City but fortunately, their plan is modelled on the old Adam West Batman<\/em> shows where The Riddler is the villain of the week and leaves convenient clues to the next location.\u00a0 In this case, they’re holding their captives inside churches that have giant statues outside with a finger or arrow pointing inside to mark where they are.\u00a0 I swear I’m not making this up.<\/p>\n

Given that Tom Hanks has chopped off his mullet for Angels and Demons<\/em>, I’m guessing the film is set in present day.\u00a0 Only its populated by characters who have no concept of any technological developments in the past twenty years.\u00a0 Tom Hanks is recruited for his knowledge of theological history and yet he literally has to run from one church to the next, racing against the clock to stop the next murder.\u00a0 Why doesn’t he set up base at a centralised location with a mobile phone and an internet connection, instructing groups of people spread around the city where to go?\u00a0 Better still, what is his motivation to even help at all?\u00a0 His life is endangered several times, he is frequently impeded by the very people who hired him and he admits that his motivation for going was access to the Vatican library which he gets early in the film.\u00a0 So often in this film, the only real reason anyone seems to do anything is ‘because its a movie and everything would stop if they didn’t’.<\/p>\n

I can appreciate the fun of a shlocky who-dunnit as much as the next guy but I think its clear that Angels and Demons<\/em> has loftier aspirations.\u00a0 It is also needlessly violent for such a goofy film and is about half an hour longer than it should be.\u00a0 There’s really not a whole lot to recommend here.\u00a0 You get to see Tom Hanks in speedos at the start of the film and it goes down from there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Hanks goes jogging. Stuff happens!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[125,126],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","tag-angels-and-demons","tag-speedos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":748,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions\/748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}