Angels and Demons
Directed by Ron Howard
On the May 16 edition of Saturday Night Live, Tom Hanks made a cameo appearance playing a very stupid version of Tom Hanks. At one point, the camera catches Stupid Tom Hanks as he gets himself trapped inside a dry-cleaning bag and tries desperately to extricate himself. It was the funniest 15 seconds of television I’ve seen in years, and it instantly brought back memories of the brilliant physical comedy in which Hanks specialized in the early years of his career–clomping around as the world’s least believable woman in drag on the television series Bosom Buddies, being subdued by a Laotian dominatrix (don’t ask) in the unjustly neglected farce Volunteers, playing “Chopsticks” with his feet in Big, and, best of all, exploding into a hysterical laughing jag of torment and despair in the wake of yet another renovation disaster in The Money Pit.
His unbeatable physical timing was matched by his facility for quick talk, sudden explosions of petulant temper, and dizzy silliness. He was the finest comic actor of the day, and judging from his bit on SNL, probably still is. But then something happened; he became James Stewart and Gary Cooper and William Holden all rolled into one, a paradigm of American decency and goodness, our best representation of ourselves. His emergence as a pop-culture saint, sonorously celebrating the space program and the Greatest Generation and John Adams, seemed until that surprising Saturday night to have knocked the funny out of him.
Now he is appearing on one million movie screens in Angels and Demons, the sequel to The DaVinci Code, yet again essaying the role of a Harvard “symbologist” on the trail of a terrible conspiracy that could shake the very core of our civilization to its foundations! Watching it, I felt as if I were in a dry-cleaning bag from which I could not escape. People are saying Angels and Demons is a better movie than The DaVinci Code, which was, admittedly, terrible. But I can’t imagine why anyone could actually think Angels and Demons was an improvement over anything save, perhaps, staring at a brick wall for two hours.
Has any major motion picture in memory had a plot with more holes in it? The entire conspiracy is uncovered through, yes, a tape recording on a hidden camera. (I think I saw that on Mannix back in 1969.) The assassin who kills off most of the victims in the course of the movie is himself blown up in a car–only it’s never explained who placed the bomb to blow him up, or who set up the elaborate computer-payoff system we see compensating the bad guy throughout the movie. Somebody’s eyeball is torn out so that it can be used to open a door locked by a retinal scanner, but there’s no clue as to how the eyeball-ripper-outer got into the highly secure facility in the first place.
And then there’s Hanks. It’s hard to think of a duller performance given in the annals of American cinema by a major film actor at the top of his game than the turn he delivers in Angels and Demons. It’s not entirely his fault; there is no character for him to play. At the beginning, he is swimming. At the end, he says hi to the pope. In between–the movie takes place over 18 hours, and feels twice as long–Hanks spends much of his time trying (I am not kidding) to go to the library.
When he is not casing the stacks, Hanks is little more than Angels and Demons‘s Basil Exposition–the name Mike Myers gave to the character in Austin Powers who is on hand to explain the plot. Hanks delivers mind-numbing information about a secret society called the Illuminati, some Vatican history, a little detail on the faith vs. science struggles, and a new explanation of the complexities of the infield-fly rule. Okay, fine, there’s nothing about the infield-fly rule, I made that up, but it would have been equally interesting had there been a monologue on the subject rather than on Bernini’s views of the papal hierarchy.
At least in The DaVinci Code, Hanks had a bizarre haircut that suggested his character was maybe a little weird. Here his hair is normal, and nothing else is different, and it seems plausible that he might have substituted an animatronic robot for himself in many of the scenes. I understand that he is likely to receive compensation on the order of $75 million for playing the part. Surely he could have done something. Raise an eyebrow. Cough. Sneeze. Something.
Hanks needs to get himself into a comedy, and soon. And not one by the Coen brothers, who directed him in the only comedy he’s made this decade, the overdeliberate and overdone The Ladykillers. He’s got to get his legs going crazy, his eyes darting about, his lips into overdrive, and his maniacal laugh on the tip of his tongue. Someone must save him from the slough of despond into which he has plunged himself.
Paging Stupid Tom Hanks. Get out the dry-cleaning bag, and stat.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
