DVDFile

Dan Brown has been selling books like hotcakes for a few years now, so it comes as no surprise that Hollywood has swooped in to cash in on the author's recent successes. Audiences talked more about Tom Hanks' haircut in The Da Vinci Code than the film itself, but Angels and Demons was a surefire hit from the word 'go': A trillion-selling book as source material, one of Hollywood's most bankable leading men as the film's star and an Oscar-winning creative team behind the camera - these three elements fused to create a perfect storm that offer that very rare Hollywood entity, the sure thing.

That being said, there's so much easy-money Hollywood sheen here that the fact that the film has very little in the way of grand emotional drama or air-tight narrative isn't surprising. The Da Vinci Code was intermittently fascinating because of its placement at the forefront of a literary phenomenon (everybody and their mother read the book; everybody and their mother saw the movie), but Angels and Demons doesn't have Da Vinci's cultural Zeitgeist to fall back on. Even with the movie's star power and big-bucks grandeur, at the end of the day, it's kinda just another movie.

In the film, scientist Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) finds a colleague of hers murdered and the fruits of her work - a flask containing quite volatile 'antimatter' - stolen. And that's just the beginning of it - The Pope has just died, and his demise has brought the resurgence of an anti-Catholic group, the Illuminati (who were behind the 'antimatter' theft), who end up kidnapping four Cardinals and virtually holding The Vatican hostage. It takes the efforts of cunning symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) to join up with Vetra to find the Cardinals and the wildly explosive 'antimatter' before the Vatican goes boom.

The connect-the-dots labyrinth of Dan Brown's story ends up being Angels and Demons' greatest asset - even if the film has nowhere near the dramatic heft of The Da Vinci Code, the act of following Vetra and Langdon as they uncover clues, get double- and triple-crossed while on a wild goose chase through Rome is at the very least engaging. Angels and Demons as a film may be shrug-worthy, but it would take a real hater to not sit through this movie in its entirety just to see what kind of paper trail these guys have to follow in order to achieve their goals.

But this writer's experience with this Blu-ray Disc was my second time seeing the film, and repeat viewings are not Angels and Demons' most imperative assets. Once the thrill of seeing where the movie ends up has passed, the movie has little else to offer. Performances are appropriate, if not stellar, director Ron Howard's sense of pacing and tone are slapshot and inconsistent - it's just another day at the office. The Da Vinci Code was deeply, often painfully flawed, but at its core, it broadcast a historical intrigue that was darned close to irresistible - in Angels and Demons, things are far less alluring. As popular as it may be, it's just your typical big-budget action mystery.

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