ANGELS & DEMONS - ron howard - 2.2 / 10

Ron Howard has always been a competent filmmaker. And while he was never going to make a masterpiece, his films had an amiable quality that made them easy to watch and hard to hate. That was especially true of his earlier work like Splash, Gung Ho and The Paper. None of them were particularly good, exactly, but they were well made, well acted and pleasant enough. Not the kind of thing you’d rush out to see again or to tell your friends about, but not a bad way to spend a couple hours. There was never going to be anything controversial or provocative, nothing risqué or even all that challenging, but a Ron Howard film could always be counted on to be entertaining. In fact, that was sort of the trademark of a Ron Howard movie.

But that all changed when Howard hooked up with Akiva Goldsman in 2001. Goldsman, perhaps the least talented, most simplistic writer currently working in major studio movies, is the man responsible for destroying the old Batman franchise (having written Batman Forever and Batman & Robin), no mean feat considering Batman might be the world’s most popular and enduring fictional character. He’s never met a cliché he didn’t love and writes as if he has a screenwriting textbook next to his laptop at all times. The man has never written anything that wasn’t oversimplified, diagrammatic and just plain boring.

When Goldsman and Howard teamed up for A Beautiful Mind and were inexplicably rewarded with a fistful of Oscars, it solidified their creative partnership. Since then they’ve collaborated on The Da Vinci Code, Cinderella Man and now Angels & Demons, growing more formulaic and dull with each film. Where a pre-Goldsman Ron Howard movie could be counted on to be entertaining and pleasant, even occasionally affecting, a post-Goldsman Ron Howard movie can be counted on to be bombastic, boring and borderline insulting in its pandering to the lowest common denominator.

In the specific case of Angels & Demons, it means that every vital piece of information is repeated at least three times so that even the least attentive viewer can follow along (e.g. the fact that the bomb is set to go off at midnight is said at least four times by four different characters). It means that there are long, incredibly dull passages of exposition that make no sense in the context of the film but ensure that the less intelligent members of the audience know exactly what’s going on (e.g. Robert Langdon’s many long digressions about Vatican history to a bunch of Vatican employees who really shouldn’t need to be lectured by some Harvard professor). And it means that making sense falls a distant second behind looking and sounding cool.

It’s filmmaking by idiots for idiots is what I’m saying. And it’s downright insulting to anyone capable of following a plot more complicated than that of the average American Idol episode. And while that might lead to a box office bonanza (indeed, Howard’s collaborations with Goldsman have been his highest grossing movies), it also makes their films nearly impossible to sit through.

I could go on and on about the myriad issues I had with Angels & Demons, like why, for instance, when Langdon and a Vatican police officer are locked in a airless vault and suffocating to death it takes them minutes to figure out that maybe shooting the glass would be a good idea. Or, for that matter, how it’s even possible that two guys could use up all the oxygen in a massive room in just a couple minutes. Or why the power was shut down that long in the first place since a ten second power outage would have accomplished their goals just as easily. But once you start down that road you get sucked into a never-ending spiral of nonsense and idiocy; each instance of absurdity leads to another moment even more ridiculous and on and on. Nothing makes any sense and pointing out the exact ways in which it all fails to cohere would require more brainpower than was used to make the film in the first place so I won't bother.

Suffice it to say that Goldsman and Howard continue their unbroken streak of commercially successful, artistically bankrupt films. And know that if you pay good money to see Angels & Demons and you have more than a couple functioning brain cells, you’re going to be disappointed and extremely bored.