Angels & Demons has been released at a time when the secular-minded are having to confront the uncomfortable claim that religion is making a comeback. Yet, while this sequel to The Da Vinci Code touches on the clash between science and religion, the Vatican and the faithful have nothing to fear. This time, it’s science and the secular that are the sinners. The film’s essential message is that the church may have a few bad apples in it, but the tree of faith is good, compassionate and necessary.

Ron Howard’s film is clearly in love with all things Catholic: the rings, the rituals, the rooms full of foggy incense and all that wonderful art and architecture. It offers a coach-party tour of Catholic splendours and ancient secrets. You’ll never get a better peek behind the closed doors of the Vatican than the one on offer here. Howard has worked hard to re-create the look and detail of this world; his film shimmers with authenticity. Yet there’s a crucial detail he’s missed. Here’s a film full of the devout — priests, cardinals, would‑be popes and the faithful masses — yet when four priests are in peril, nobody prays for their safe return.

Then again, unlike The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons doesn’t touch on matters of theology, preferring instead to stay within the uncontroversial terrain of the thriller. It aims its swipes at the emptiness and arrogance of the scientific world. (There’s much talk of people being sacrificed on the “altar of science”.) But, whereas Howard managed to dramatise the battle between Frost and Nixon so powerfully, the battle between God and Richard Dawkins — if I may put it that way — is never fully realised.

The plot kicks off with the death of a progressive-minded pope and a church facing “change and dissent”. The process of picking a new Holy Father is under way when four cardinals, who are all possible candidates for the job, are kidnapped by an ancient and secret group called the Illuminati. They are threatening to kill one cardinal every hour as an act of revenge for the crimes the church subjected them to a couple of hundred years earlier. Curiously, nobody ever asks the question: why now?

Meanwhile, in another part of Rome, a team of scientists, led by the beautiful Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), have been playing God and have created a canister of anti­matter capable of mass destruction. That, too, is in the hands of the Illuminati, who plan to blow up Vatican City. Instead of calling for divine intervention, the church authorities get their old adversary Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) to come and de­cipher the Illuminati codes that will reveal where the priests will die and where the antimatter is hidden.

Langdon is supposedly a brilliant professor of religious iconology and symbology at Harvard Uni­versity; how odd, then, that he doesn’t speak sufficient Latin or even Italian to translate key life-saving texts, and has to ask for help. It’s a remarkable gaffe, though the faithful — that is, the Dan Brown readership — will find enough conspiracies, complex codes and difficult clues to keep them happy. On the big screen, though, this stuff is as dull as watching someone doing a crossword puzzle for more than two hours. And the film suffers from the same problem as The Da Vinci Code: too much exposition. We get scene after scene of Langdon explaining the meaning of this statue and the significance of that symbol. Thank God he didn’t have to take a pee, or we’d have been treated to a lecture on the subtextual symbolism of Vatican latrines from 1502 to 1843.

As a cracking tale of code-cracking, Angels & Demons never really works. Howard doesn’t create the drama of a great mind facing great challenges, struggling to see the truth as the clock ticks. What’s more, Langdon comes across as a rather boring and bland figure. The demands of the plot have pushed out any time for scenes where we might see his personality: the man is a human Enigma machine. Of course, it’s difficult for any actor to know what to do with all this dialogue. Hanks has opted to play it absolutely straight, so he just stands around looking puzzled, or looking grave, or combining the two and looking guzzled — and then out pops the answer.

The film’s energy is dissipated by all this talk, and by the repeated sequences of Langdon rushing from one church to another. Howard tries all the tricks in the book to jazz things up — zooming cars, shoot-outs, thunderous, Omen-like music and grisly murders, which are rather strong for 12-year-olds — but to no avail.

12A, 138 mins

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