There have been rumblings of discontent from the Vatican. The whiff of censure has permeated the Roman Catholic Church like particularly potent incense. Ever since 2006, when Church officials blasted the Ron Howard movie The Da Vinci Code as “an offence against God”, controversy has swirled about its sequel, Angels & Demons.

While the Dan Brown novel on which it was based is not as blatantly sacrilegious as The Da Vinci Code, there is plenty there to offend delicate religious sensibilities. The plot pitches the Vatican against an age-old enemy, the Illuminati, a secret cabal that has infiltrated at the highest level and threatens the very fabric of Catholicism. Tom Hanks returns as the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, the man who holds the key to unlock a trail of arcane clues and potentially save the Church.

No doubt the film’s producers settled back and rubbed their hands together in anticipation of reams of free publicity courtesy of outraged rent-a-quote clerics.

Then came the review in the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which described the film as “harmless”. Harmless! It’s either a brilliant piece of box-office jeopardising passive-aggressive faint praise by the Vatican or it could genuinely be the official line on the film. Either way, it’s hard to think of a blander label to stick on a movie. It’s the kind of word that shrivels a film’s appeal like a punctured balloon.

Will the Vatican’s appraisal ultimately harm the film’s prospects? It seems unlikely. The pernicious lure of Dan Brown’s clunky prose and fiendishly convoluted plotting remains depressingly strong. This graceless and overwrought piece of storytelling will probably earn a Pope’s ransom at the box office, despite its many flaws.

The main problem here is the screenplay. Despite the presence of A-list Hollywood scribes David Koepp (Spider-Man, War of the Worlds) and Akiva Goldsmith (Hancock, I Am Legend), this is a brutally ugly piece of writing. There’s no thrill of discovery here for the audience following the same paper trail of clues as Langdon. Instead, the film doesn’t credit its audience with the intelligence to work out anything on its own.

Everything must be explained and overexplained. The dialogue is crammed with clumsy exposition intended to detail the finer points of Catholic lore and the mythic history of the Illuminati. Langdon doesn’t converse with people, he lectures them. There’s only one line in the whole film that feels like something an actual person could have said and that is delivered in a voice dripping sarcasm by Stellan Skarsgård, playing the head of Vatican security. “What a relief,” he sneers as Langdon is introduced. “The symbologist is here.”

The theme of the film is the conflict between religion and science. And if you think Brown’s writing lacks respect for religion, just wait and see what happens when he gets his teeth into science. Langdon’s intense Euro-totty sidekick in this instalment is Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), a glamorous particle physicist who has mislaid a jam jar full of antimatter that might just spell disaster for the Vatican. It seems a little unlikely that the world’s sharpest scientific minds would choose to store such an unstable substance between a pair of electron magnets powered by a battery with less juice than the average mobile phone, thus effectively turning it into a time bomb, but that’s what happens.

Howard instils a sense of urgency with lots of shots of feet dashing across marble floors and crimson-cloaked cardinals sweeping through the Vatican’s corridors of power wearing serious expressions. He falls into the Hollywood trap of too much coverage – every scene is shot from every conceivable direction. The constant cutting from angle to new angle makes it difficult to appraise or appreciate the performances – which is a pity because in Skarsgård, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Thure Lindhardt, Howard has assembled an impressive supporting cast of northern European acting talent.

12A, 140mins

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