Stars: Tom Hanks, Ayeley Zurer, Ewan McGregor, Armin Mueller Stahl, Stellan Skarsgard
Running time: 138 mins
Rating: ★★★

THE film of Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code made a lot of money and a lot of enemies.

The bad feeling didn’t emanate just from the Catholic Church – less than pleased at a plot suggesting all sorts of skeletons in Christ’s closet – but from critics who found it not offensive, just dull and boring.

This time Hanks’ Robert Langdon is called in after four cardinals, all hot tips for the top job, go missing during the election of a new pope. The abductors promise to kill one cardinal every hour and use some anti-matter they’ve stolen to blow up the Vatican unless their demands are met. Best not to examine the story too closely, just pray that nobody notices the gaping holes in the plot.

Langdon and Italian scientist Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), an anti-matter expert, spend their time rushing around Rome solving clues as to where the next cardinal will meet a sticky end. Various recognisable European actors, including Stellan Skarsgard and Armin Mueller Stahl, skulk around looking suspicious in the absence of anything dramatic to do. Hanks brings nothing special to the role of Langdon apart from a shorter new hairstyle.

Vetra doesn’t even get a snog with her leading man, although I liked her style of simply tearing the page she wants out of a valuable Vatican library book.

An Irish-accented Ewan McGregor swishes about in a cassock as a priest who proves a dab hand at flying a helicopter and parachuting, of which there is little use in the Catholic Church in normal circumstances.

Director Howard, fresh from the much better Frost/Nixon, ensures it moves along swiftly enough, but the film completely blows it with a ridiculously overblown finale that beggars belief and a final twist that most will see coming a mile off.