[показать]Having read many negative reviews on IMDB and rottentomatoes.com, I've been thinking for a while if I should spend money for a movie ticket or wait until "Angels and Demons" comes out on DVD. I decided to go with the former, but, after almost falling asleep several times during the movie and getting a headache from a terrible camera work, I feel that I should have done the latter.

First of all, I'd like to point out that I was expecting to like "Angels and Demons" because I remember enjoying "The Da Vinci Code". I'm also a big fan of movies that try to build suspense on combination of reality and fiction, especially those about religious cults, such as "Bless the Child", etc. As far as I know, Brown is famous for exactly this kind of stories, and "Angels and Demons" is one of them.

Despite very interesting premise, however, I found the movie to be a major disappointment. While in the movie theatre, I felt that I was not watching the film but playing a video game. Since "Harry Potter" is the only video game I have ever played, it is the only comparison I can make. So, overall, I felt that Tom Hank's character Robert Langdon was pretty much Harry Potter of the movie, who had to move from level to level in order to win the game.

There were four levels that I would have called "Save the cardinal", which is the character's mission. In each new level, Langdon is looking for clues, finds them, runs with a bunch of other people to some destination in order to try and save the bishop. On the way there, Langdon faces a few challenges set up by the villain, looses, the priest dies, and everything starts from the very beginning. The searching for clues, the running, the "fight the villain" parts repeat themselves four times, and this is pretty much what the whole thing is about.

To make matters worse, Ron Howard, the director, tried to compensate for excruciatingly boring plot by making the camera move as fast as possible. Sometimes, I seriously felt that I was sitting on the merry-go-round and was watching the world spinning in front of me. All these running, chasing, shaky camera made me extremely dizzy and made the whole experience even worse than it would have been otherwise. It was also the reason why I was hardly able to follow the plot and keep track on what was going on in the movie.

I don't know if I would have liked "Angels and Demons" better if I had read the book, but, since I haven't, the only conclusion that I can make is that this movie stinks and was worth neither 9 bucks nor 2 hours of my time.