Angels & Demons
Director: Ron Howard
The Hangover
Director: Todd Phillips
Mark of an Angel
Director: Safy Nebbou
Tormented
Director: Jon Wright
Imagine an episode of 24 in which, instead of acting swiftly to prevent a major catastrophe, Jack Bauer paused to show off his erudition. This is the experience of watching Angels & Demons, the second film to feature Dan Brown’s educated alter ego, Dr Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks). This time, the distinguished academic is tasked with saving four cardinals in four hours and then locating a vial containing a virus that could destroy the Vatican, which is on the brink of electing a new pope. Langdon spends a good portion of vital time explaining stuff for our benefit.
Hanks is an unlikely academic and an even more improbable action hero. You want screenwriters David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman to get to the point much quicker, but you suspect it may be in Brown’s contract that explanations are part of the deal and at least 30 per cent of his research had to end up in the finished film.
Director Ron Howard has a real problem reconciling the detailed explanations of the process by which a pontiff is elected and the history of the anti-Christian Illuminati with the demands of an action thriller. In particular, he cannot make palatable a film in which the characters constantly have their learning confirmed. The casting of the likeable Hanks is meant to mask the fact that Langdon is a smug know-it-all with little back-story.
The strangeness of watching Hanks in both Angels & Demons and its cinematic predecessor, The Da Vinci Code, is that he is the only American among Europeans. It is like seeing Sylvester Stallone holding a football scarf: you know it does not make sense. For a film with a high body count, the moment when an assassin spares Langdon’s life because he is not holding a gun and so does not threaten him is ludicrous. Langdon is the only way the assassin might get caught and the cardinals saved.
Langdon’s sidekick this time is a scientist, Vittoria (Ayelet Zurer), whose contribution is negligible. Ewan McGregor swaps the Jedi religion for Roman Catholicism as a papal functionary. He has an unintentionally comic moment when he parachutes from a helicopter into Vatican City and you realise that no one could take him seriously as James Bond, not least in those robes.
I confess to falling asleep at the point when Langdon finds himself trapped in a vault being deprived of oxygen. I knew how he felt.
A future film studies question might be: “To what extent has Dude, Where’s My Car influenced classical Hollywood narrative?” I thought of this as I watched The Hangover, a structurally interesting but formulaic male buddy movie. In it, Phil, Stu and Alan (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis) have the stag night of their lives in Las Vegas. The morning after, they cannot remember how a tiger ended up in their hotel suite, how one of them got hitched to a go-go dancer (Heather Graham), lost a tooth and ended up with a baby, and, crucially, where the groom, Doug (Justin Bartha) is. A retracing of steps reveals that they have also stolen a police car and $80,000 from a camp Asian gambler (Ken Jeong).
A recurring motif is a coming to terms with bad behaviour. The Hangover has the added frisson of a cameo from Mike Tyson playing himself, treading a line between self-mockery, as he mimes to a Phil Collins record, and pathos, when he pointedly remarks: “We all do bad things when drunk sometimes”.
The disappointment is that so many situations are resolved quickly in self-contained episodes. The police are talked round. Tyson is placated. Stu even gets his grandmother’s “Holocaust ring” back. There is a slight twist involving the groom but it is resolved without too much difficulty.
The theme of guys making amends for their excesses is certainly topical, but feels disingenuous as explored here. Their behaviour is explained by ingesting the wrong drug and there is no sense of lasting guilt. It is, in short, your average disposable male comedy. The three central performers may be unfamiliar to British audiences, but the jokes are not. The crass stereotypes of Stu’s harridan girlfriend and the Asian gambler certainly leave a nasty aftertaste. For those not answering exam questions in storytelling, The Hangover is one to forget.
The Paris-set psychological drama, Mark of an Angel, begins and ends with the caption “Inspired by real events” for good reason. The story is highly improbable. At the start, a middle-aged pharmacy assistant (Catherine Frot) is confronted with a spectacle of a burning building that recalls an earlier trauma. She fixates on a seven-year-old girl, Lola, whom she believes is her daughter, Lucie, said to have perished in a hospital fire. She becomes friendly with the girl’s mother (Sandrine Bonnaire) through her son. The younger woman is moving to Montreal with her family. The older woman, plagued by insomnia, stalks her, ostensibly to get closer to Lola. You expect the child to be snatched, but the older woman is more rational, even in a distressed state, sharing her conviction with her parents and finally with Lola’s mother. Then comes the coincidence that is hard to take.
There are many writers and directors who explore twists of fate but do so to make wider points about the human condition. Here, co-writer-director Samy Nebbou is purely interested in melodrama, adding to it the overtones of a thriller. The psychological trauma is handled extremely well, with Frot giving a convincing performance of a woman caught up in her wish fulfilment. Scenes of her being consumed by her conviction are genuinely painful to watch.
Horror films have to possess a heart of darkness – an unshakeable belief in the basest instincts of humankind. Tormented, nominally a British teen horror film lacks not just such a heart but also a pulse. It is as aesthetically dead as its main character, Darren Mullet (Calvin Dean), a zombie revenging himself against the students who provoked his suicide. First he texts them and then he attacks them with sharp instruments or music – which is almost the same thing).
If you compare Master Mullet to Jason Vorhees (star of the Friday the 13th movies), Freddy Krueger (Nightmare on Elm Street) or even Michael (Halloween) Myers, this is simply a monster you cannot take seriously. After all, he’s named after a haircut.
Writer Stephen Prentice and director Jon Wright know the conventions of the stalk and slash film. Nubile but insensitive teens do provocative things and put themselves in harm’s way. If you relieve yourself on Mullet’s grave, watch out. Listen to rock while you are supposed to be removing a defamatory website? Then beware. And if you muck around near a guillotine you’re asking for trouble.
Nominally, Tormented carries an anti-bullying message, but if you cannot take the film seriously – it is simply a series of contrived death sequences – why would you heed its sentiment? The adults at the school where mayhem takes place are moronic. Internal logic goes astray, though the film has a half-plot involving the head girl (Tuppence Middleton) falling in with a bad crowd. I wrote in my notes: “The guy next to me finds it funnier than Lesbian Vampire Killers’”. But that’s not hard.
Patrick Mulcahy
