“Angels and Demons”((Movie Review)(A dud))

(5-23-2009) Let me say this in as few words I can, the movie “Angels and Demon,” to me was a dud, failure as a motion picture, and I would imagine as a book (I haven’t read the book but if it is anything like the move, it is a dud also). It had nothing new under the sun. I am not sure who the angels were, other than the statues throughout Rome and the Vatican, and Tom Hanks, who is emotionless in this movie runs around Rome, and in particular the Vatican grounds looking at them, in and out of Catholic churches, St. Peters Square, as the new Pope is being elected. What we have here is a murder sequence, as old as the hills. One of the members of a so called cult—I guess he’s the demon, is murdering cardinals, and has planted a bomb in the grotto of St. Peter. And we see cars races from church to church and Tom trying to get there in time to save the day, and the cardinals, and which does, one save one out of four. And so we got this murderer, killing guards and Cardinals, and another demon priest behind the scenes; incidentally, these are human demons, because the murder got shot and like any human with a bullet hole in him, he had his moment of agony.
Mr. Dan Brown uses the Church again, as a backdrop for his unending adventure, to get people angry, with faithless Hanks. I think he thought the Vatican was going to fall into his same old trap and give him free publicity, for an old theme. There is not much imagination, or originality in this movie, and I was hoping it would end about in the middle, when I started to figure out what was going on. I was thinking of putting “The Creature from the Black Lagoon,” in my DVD set, and watching it, instead of “Angels and Demons.” The Creature is more a demon than the demons in Brown’s movie. And there is some girl who is tagging along with Hanks, not sure what her purpose is, she can’t dismantle the bomb, although she can rip a page out of an old manuscript.
There is a bomb and it does go off, but only after the priest who seems to have the run of the house at the Vatican and whom has killed the first Pope, and is hoping to be elected a Pope, take the bomb and his helicopter and zooms in the air to let it go off, and parachutes out to safety in the nick of time. He is the new messiah on the block for about five minutes of the movie. The move is a dud, dull, and kind of harebrain; Dan Brown has written nothing new, and Tom Hanks who I like, should stop playing these kind of movies, he doesn’t do well in them.