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Grant's Film Club - Friday, May 15

18 May 2009, 17:24

In this edition of ‘Film Club’ STV’s entertainment correspondent Grant Lauchlan reviews Ron Howard’s religious thriller, Angels and Demons, and a film whose title says it all: Fighting.

Angels and Demons (12A)

After the phenomenal success of the movie version of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, a sequel was always inevitable. Angels and Demons is a big improvement on its predecessor yet still falls well short of the edge-of-your-seat thriller that the source material deserves to be.

Tom Hanks returns to play Robert Langdon, symbiologist and professor of religious iconography at Harvard University. The history world’s answer to Hercule Poirot. Where Langdon goes, gruesome murders and mystery seems to follow.

In his last adventure he was pitted against the Catholic Church. This time Langdon is thrust into the heart of the Vatican to save it from one of its oldest enemies, the secret brotherhood of the Illuminati.  Director Howard has quickened up the pace for this sequel but the plot appears farfetched and too deliberate.

The film’s plot is literally spelled out in each scene and like the easy read the film originates from, Angels and Demons is an equally easy watch, but too easy for Grant’s liking; “It’s Scooby Doo for grown ups.”

Fighting (15)

For a movie about fighting there isn’t much of it. It fails to pack much punch dramatically either.

The way the film’s brawny protagonist Shawn MacArthur (Channing Tatum) approaches each fight, pretty much sums up the movie. He arrives, nonchalantly, with an entourage of dullards and saunters in with no fanfare, no charisma and zero tension in the build up for the brief spat we’re about to witness.

The acting performances are let down by the snail pace narrative and the plot is built on a chain of contrivances and a wholly unoriginal plot. More talking than Fighting, the film fails to deliver what it says on the can.
 

Last updated: 18 May 2009, 17:28