Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard re-team for the religious-lit thriller and hit-in-waiting Angels & Demons, the conspiratorially tinged follow-up to the smash hit The Da Vinci Code, and if there’s really nothing about the movie that screams out for the necessity of its existence, neither will audiences already predisposed toward inking this in their plans over the next couple weeks feel cheated by anything that unfolds onscreen. To the degree that it works, it’s as a lesson in the gravitational pull
of a movie star’s accrued goodwill. Ditching the derided hairstyle of
his first run-through as Harvard professor and religious
symbology expert Robert Langdon, Hanks is the well-oiled pace car that keeps this entire thing moving at a sustained, reasonable clip.

Pulled away from an early morning swim by a representative of the Catholic Church, Langdon is whisked away to Vatican City. There, in the wake of the natural death of a progressive and beloved pope, Langdon is shown evidence of the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati. A powerful scientific-intellectual brotherhood driven underground centuries ago by the persecution of the church, the Illuminati seem behind a dastardly plot — the kidnapping and announced execution of four favored cardinals, and a hidden bomb made of anti-matter — that leaves less than five hours until a bloodbath that will consume much of Vatican City.

Langdon joins forces with Inspector Olivetti (Pierfrancesco Favino, above right) and Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), an enigmatic Italian scientist; together, they embark on a frantic dash through the Vatican’s secretive vault, old cathedrals, sealed crypts and dangerous catacombs, facing snide and stone-faced pushback from Commander Richter (Stellan Skarsgard, looking gassy), the head of the Swiss Guard, the pope’s personal security detail. While Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl) insists on proceeding with the conclave that will choose the next pope, Camerlengo Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor) pushes for extra time and evacuation measures, all while hoping that Langdon and Vetra can untangle a 400-year-old trail of ancient symbols that serve as the Vatican’s best hope for survival.

Regardless of what one typically thinks of his choice in material — and the revisionist haters seem most likely to clamorously cite A Beautiful Mind in their bashings — Howard is surely a highly functional director, and he inflicts no great harm upon the material here. In fact, I’d say he gives it as solid a polish as could be expected while still retaining a reasonable degree of austerity and solemnity. The screenplay, by David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, doesn’t achieve transcendent moments of cleverness, but it does manage to avoid most of the sludgy pitfalls that plagued The Da Vinci Code, if also coming across as unintentionally silly in the cable news coverage of the Catholic conclave. Its chief problem, though, is that the literary-historical elements of the story that so root it in detail are the same things that work against the film’s time-crunch structure, which doesn’t really play convincingly. Vatican City isn’t the size of Texas, but neither is it a mere four or five city blocks, so the announced public execution/body dumpings of the cardinals (one per hour, starting at 8 o’clock) place imposing demands on the narrative that Koepp and Goldsman never fully solve. Instead, when in a pinch, Langdon scours a map and just blurts out something like, “Angels are pointing the way!” and the audience, unreasonably, is meant to say, “Oh, well, sure, that makes sense.”

The movie is facile, though, and again, that’s a credit to Hanks, who is a smart and intuitive actor, quite apart from being just a likeable one. In addition to just having the authority to convey historical detail and theory in such a compressed fashion, Hanks also has a keen feeling for how much exasperation, assertiveness or swallowed panic to inject into a given moment; when he meets Commander Richter’s snootiness with a wry, “Hey, fellas, you called me,” or argues an important point of timeliness with a pair of Italian cops, it has the ability to blind less critically-leaning minds — temporarily, perhaps, but effectively — to the narrative’s implausabilities. And that, my friends, is the definition of star power — the superhuman ability to effect suspension of disbelief.

Apart from Langdon, though, most of the characters in Angels & Demons don’t tightly hold on to one’s attention. McGregor’s is the flashiest, most substantive supporting role, and he does a fine enough job. But what does it say about me that the character with whom I most identify is an assassin (Nikolaj Lie Kass) who says, “When they call me, it’s so important to them for me to know that they’re doing God’s will, or Allah’s, or Yahweh’s, and I suppose they’re right, because without them I wouldn’t exist”? I’m not sure. But with that line, I found myself pondering a much more interesting filmic spin-off… (Sony, PG-13, 138 minutes)