Digital Done Write

How do you make a sequel to a blockbuster, asks Christopher Orr in The New Republic, when the star of your film declines to return for a second go-round? He’s referring, of course, to Tom Hanks’s hairdo in The Da Vinci Code. Slipshod and plodding though that film was, the mullety muss adorning Hanks’s pate was a source of nearly inexhaustible amusement, according to Orr. “I’m unlikely ever to watch the film again, but if I were to, it would be for the hair.” he says.

For Angels & Demons, Hanks’s character, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, has returned, but without the mullet, which in the interim evidently detached itself from his scalp and crawled off to some dark corner: The movie never quite recovers from its loss, suggests Orr.

For its first three quarters, Angels & Demons is less awful than The Da Vinci Code: unremittingly silly and unexpectedly violent, but better paced and with a cast that seems generally committed to the task at hand. But in its closing laps, Angels & Demons makes up the distance with a series of twists that brutalize science and faith, character and continuity, and anything approximating narrative coherence. No, the film does not conclude with Langdon being elected Pope himself, but, watching the spiraling inanities of the last 20 minutes, one might be forgiven for thinking it would be the next logical step.

Read Christopher Orr’s full review in The New Republic …