David Farnor | On 05, May 2025

Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Stellan Skarsgård
Certificate: 12

How does the Catholic Church choose a new pope? What does CERN do? Can Ewan McGregor fly a helicopter? All these are questions and more are answered in Angels & Demons, Ron Howard’s fantastically implausible sequel to The Da Vinci Code.

The first thriller, based on Dan Brown’s book of the same name, introduced us to Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), a symbologist who is roped into investigating a murder in Paris that unravelled into a conspiracy involving the Holy Grail. Full of exposition and mini-lectures from the historian, it was a bloated, long-winded slice of cheese that entertained purely because of how absurd it all was. This 2009 sequel, based on a book that Brown had written before The Da Vinci Code, is entertaining because it’s actually entertaining in its own right. The lengthy exposition is still in place, but this time they do all the speeches while running.

It’s a subtle but important difference, and it gives the entire endeavour a welcome shot of pace and energy. The running mostly takes place between churchs in Rome – Langdon is recruited to find a quartet of cardinals who have been kidnapped the day before a conclave is due to start, following the death of the pope. While cardinals from across the world fly to Rome to prepare for the closed-door election of the next of head of the Catholic Church, Langdon is literally following the directions of pointing statues to get to the next kidnapped cardinal before a gruesome death can occur.

He’s joined this time by Dr Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), from CERN in Switzerland, where scientists have been conducting physics experiments at the speed of light to play with antimatter and determine how the creation of the universe happened. When a so-called “God particle” is stolen, she also heads to Rome to play detective – because the antimatter has been hidden in the city and, once all the cardinals have been killed, is threatened to be detonated so it destroys the Vatican.

Holding together these two threads is the reappearance of the Illuminati, an 18th-centure secrety society that has since taken all kinds of associations and interprepatations. The important thing to note here is that this has the Catholic Church quaking in its boots – so much so that Father Patrick (Ewan McGregor), the Camerlengo who oversees the Holy See while the papal seat is empty, is willing to recruit Langdon to help them, even after his Da Vinci escapades embarrassed them all. At Patrick’s side is the stern head of the Swiss Guard (the perfectly gruff Stellan Skarsgård), the chief of the Vatican state police (Pierfrancesco Favino) and the wary but wise head of the conclave, Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Scurrying about between them all is the always-excellent Nikolaj Lie Kaas (of the Department Q films) as a suitably intimidating and ruthless assassin.

As the dead bodies begin to stack up – many of them in gruesome set pieces that recall David Fincher’s Seven or ITV’s Messiah – and speculation over who the next pope will be simmer in the background, the result is a surprisingly gripping mix of murder, church politics, conspiracy theories and code-cracking. The cast all sink their teeth into the daftness of it all with just the right amount of self-aware seriousness, with McGregor gamely carrying the emotional heart of the film. There aren’t many actors who can convincingly grieve and talk about Vatican archives while also being a helicopter pilot, and he’s more than up to the task here, even if his accent is occasionally a little overdone. Hanks, meanwhile, benefits from having The Da Vinci Code under his belt, as he has fun giving Langdon’s not-quite-God-sceptic academic more nuance that you’d expect.

But it’s director Ron Howard and screenwriters David Koepp and Akiva Goldman who are the heroes here. Howard does a remarkable job of dodging around a ban on filming in the Vatican, using green screen and other locations to achieve something that really does feel authentic. The script, meanwhile, is far less reverent to the source material than The Da Vinci Code, trimming, rearranging and skipping through whole chunks of the novel to create something that, even at 138 minutes, is far more streamlined – while still being able to savour the intrigue around the age-old ritual of a papal election. Cardinals vote, statues point, clues unravel, and everything clips along at a satisfying pace that keeps you enjoying the ridiculous spectacle. It only falls apart when people stop running. This time, fortunately, they don’t.

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