by Joe Murray

Created on: May 16, 2009   Last Updated: May 18, 2009

Just as the most delicious gossip is the most inaccurate, the same applies to storytelling, the principle reason why a "tale" is synonymous with lying. So it goes for "Angels & Demons" whose principle fabricator, Dan Brown, ascribes to the idea that if you're going to lie, then lie BIG.

"The Da Vinci Code's" Robert Langdon is again recruited to unravel yet another intractable series of clues that threaten to expose yet another ultimate scandal, bring down the Catholic Church and destroy Western Civilization as we know it. Oh, yeah, there's also an antimatter bomb sitting around somewhere in the cellars of Vatican City which, we are assured, if detonated will also obliterate most of Rome. Cool!

In a way, "Angels" is "Da Vinci Code" inside out. Instead of an ultra-orthodox religious cabal, "Angel's" Illuminati is one claiming to harbor the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse lab coat style. Instead of an Opus Dei ascetic in a hair shirt and cilice, this assassin (Danish film vet Nikolaj Lie Kaas) favors Armani eyewear and works out of a minibus. Instead of an inward journey to locate the direct descendant of Christ, "Angels" relates a very public journey of vicious retribution and ultimate cataclysm. And, as much as I hate to admit it, this movie is a lot more fun.

The film opens after the death of the last pope, detailing for us, in gorgeous close-ups, the minutia of ritual observed afterward. The narrative then flips to CERN's Very Large Hadron Collider under Switzerland, some of which was actually filmed there, though, no doubt, the incandescent control rooms, realized in Los Angeles, gilded the envy of the real CERN scientists trapped in their cheerless cinderblock bunkers. No matter. The power-up and operation of the real/fake collider is a visual tour de force, complete with X-ray vision inside-out close-ups of the minutia of hyper-budget science, the culmination of which is to trap three pinky-nail sized gossamer nimbi of antimatter in three C-Thru magnetic bottles. Ah, but skullduggery's afoot, and before you can say "Bible," one of the bottle's goes missing.

Back in Rome, more bad stuff keeps happening. It seems that agents of the Illuminati have kidnapped four of the prime Papal candidates, threatening to execute them each hour after 8:00 pm Vatican time (what's Dan Brown got against the Catholics?) ending with a big bang somewhere in the Holy See at midnight, starring our stolen antimatter.

Naturally, the Swiss Guard sends an agent to Cambridge

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