Eye Candy #228 - "Angels and Demons"

Angels and Demons:  All of Dan Brown’s stories are formulaic to the hilt.  Young protagonist, telegraphed betrayal, they are a lot like reading the same book over and over again.  “Angels & Demons” in my opinion is a better book than the better-known “DaVinci Code”, and seeing as how generally underwhelming that movie adaptation was, I had some concerns about “A&D”.  Back again is Tom Hanks as symbologist Robert Langdon, this time called in to find the Illuminati, a secret societ in Rome bent on a murderous revenge against the Catholic Church, using an antimatter bomb obtained from CERN.  The script this time around does a much better job translating the energy and urgency present in the book to the screen (some “DaVinci Code”) didn’t.   Gone are some of the unnecessary subplots (and you don’t really miss them; Brown‘s books don‘t really stick with you) and some characters are tweaked (particularly the assassin and camerlengo characters), and there is less baggage all around as the previous film was almost crippled by exposition.  Hanks has a solid supporting cast this go-round, with Ewan McGregor, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Ayelet Zurer, and Pierfrancesco Favino, to name a few.  This a solid 3 ½ star movie.  Woodchuck sez, “Better than ‘DaVinci‘.”