The better angels of our nature

Inferno, the third installment in Ron Howard’s series of Dan Brown adaptations starring Tom Hanks, arrives in theaters this weekend. Like Jack Reacher, it’s a franchise that doesn’t exactly have an enthusiastic following, and it seems to exist largely as a strategic component in the careers of its star and director. (This sequel, at least, appears to have a realistic view of its prospects: its budget is half that of its predecessor.) I wouldn’t even be mentioning it here if it weren’t for an embarrassing personal confession. I’m not a fan of the Robert Langdon books. If anything, I’m inclined to dislike them more than many readers, because I genuinely enjoy the idea of the conspiracy thriller. I even wrote an entire novel, The Icon Thief, in part to tell precisely that kind of story in the way I thought it deserved to be told. Even after the letdown of The Da Vinci Code, I was optimistic enough to buy The Lost Symbol, on the reasoning that a sequel released under high pressure by a major publisher would be a slick, tightly edited product—which didn’t turn out to be the case. I haven’t read any of the others. But here’s my confession: Angels & Demons, the film based on the first novel in the series, might be one of my stealth favorite movies. Even as I type this, I know how ridiculous it sounds. This isn’t a film that anyone remembers fondly. You don’t see video boxes proclaiming: “The best thriller since Angels & Demons.”

Why do I love it so much? Maybe it’s because it came out only seven years ago, but it already feels like a relic of another era, in which a studio could spend $150 million on a ridiculous summer movie aimed squarely at viewers over thirty. I’ve written here before that what I want from Hollywood, more than just about anything else, is slick, entertaining junk for grownups. These days, the industry has gravitated toward two opposing extremes, with superhero movies giving way in the winter to prestige pictures that feel like the cinematic equivalent of taking your medicine. Yet the most exciting periods in movie history were in decades when you could often see a reasonably clever director and screenwriter doing diverting things for ninety minutes with a couple of attractive stars. Aside from the occasional Bond or Ethan Hunt vehicle, this sort of thing has become dishearteningly rare, to the point where I’ve actually found myself looking forward to movies like Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. (Oddly enough, we’re currently in the middle of a fairly good stretch for mainstream adult thrillers: along with Inferno, the last few weeks have given us The Girl on the Train, The Accountant, and a second Jack Reacher movie. I haven’t managed to see any of them, of course—which may be the real reason why adults in their late thirties aren’t seen as a desirable demographic.) And while Angels & Demons is far from a masterpiece, it feels like a blockbuster from an alternate universe, in which a lot of money and talent could be gloriously squandered by a film that couldn’t possibly interest a twelve year old.

But I don’t want to downplay its legitimate strengths, either. To say that the money is all there on the screen may not seem like heartfelt praise, but it is. There’s plenty of digital imagery, but it’s unobtrusive, and at a time when the climax of every comic book movie makes me feel like I’m watching a cartoon about two robots having a fistfight, it’s nice to see an expensive production set in something like the real world. It’s equally refreshing to watch a movie that takes pleasure in the locations, simulated or otherwise, of a single beautiful city. Its Rome is a nocturnal metropolis of golden lights against water, glossy marble churches, and fast cars winding through narrow streets, and it reminds us of how films like the Bourne movies flit so quickly from one landmark to another that we never have a chance to enjoy our surroundings. It helps, too, that the movie is populated by so many appealing players. There’s Hanks, of course, who I suspect secretly relishes playing Robert Langdon as kind of a smug asshole, and Ewan McGregor and Stellan Skarsgård, who are here only for the paycheck. But we also have the tough, beautiful Ayelet Zurer; Armin Mueller-Stahl, very good in the thankless role of a red herring in a cassock; and character actors with great faces like Pierfrancesco Favino and Nikolaj Lie Kass. The script by Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp keeps all the wheels turning nicely, and it clearly learned the lessons of The Da Vinci Code—the action is clean and rapid without being relentless, and you’re left feeling refreshed, rather than pummeled.

It all adds up to one of my favorite guilty pleasures, right up there with the first season of The Hills, and for many of the same reasons. There are sequences of high camp that make me grin like an idiot whenever I think about them: Langdon’s unsolicited lecture about Pius IX and “the great castration,” which makes him seem even more pompous than usual, or the priceless moment when the Camerlengo points a finger at his assailant and shouts: “Illuminatus!” This kind of thing pleases me enormously. I also like how the villain’s master plan hinges entirely on Langdon’s ability to figure out the plot with split-second precision, and how the whole conspiracy would be foiled if the timing were off by a few minutes in either direction. And unlike so many thrillers, it knows how to give a worthy death scene to its bad guy, who, after being exposed and pursued through St. Peter’s Church, burns himself to death at the altar, and for no particular reason. The result slips invisibly over the borderline from being a great bad movie to one that I can almost recommend on its own merits. Although it’s ravishingly pretty, it’s probably best experienced at home, on a disc bought from a cutout bin at Best Buy, which makes its immense technical resources—a little overwhelming or oppressive in the theater—seem like an act of unsolicited generosity. And it sticks in your head. A few months ago, I was watching Spectre, which was filmed on many of the same locations, when I found myself thinking: “I’d rather be watching Angels & Demons.” I’m probably the only person in the world who said this to himself. But I did. I’d be happy to put it on again tonight. And maybe I will.

The Two Jacks

Over the weekend, my wife and I finally saw one of our most anticipated movies of 2014: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. And I’m only slightly joking. Shadow Recruit is the kind of film that seems designed to be seen exactly the way we watched it—streaming on Netflix, in our living room, shortly after the baby had gone to bed. It’s an agreeably modest thriller with correspondingly modest ambitions, and even if it doesn’t end up being particularly good, it’s hard to hate a movie that takes place in some nifty locations, offers up fun supporting roles for the likes of Kenneth Branagh, Kevin Costner, and a slew of veteran character actors, including an unbilled Mikhail Baryshnikov, and clocks in at well under two hours. The story is a trifle that falls apart as you watch it; it opens with the villains trying and failing to kill the title character, who has turned up to investigate some financial improprieties in Moscow, when they could have achieved most of their goals by sticking him in a nice office and stalling him for two days. And I spent most of the movie wrongly convinced that the love interest played by Keira Knightley was really a British undercover agent, which seemed like the only way to justify her inexplicable American accent.

Yet for all its mediocrity, it’s the kind of movie I’d like to see more often: one that falls squarely in the middle of the pack in terms of spectacle, budget, and even basic competence. Hollywood these days has gravitated toward two opposing extremes, with massive summer tentpoles giving way in the winter to smaller prestige films, which often feel like the cinematic equivalent of taking your medicine before bedtime. In between, you have the usual slew of bad comedies, cheap horror movies, and Nicholas Sparks adaptations, but what’s missing, aside from the occasional Liam Neeson vehicle, is slick, capable junk for grownups. I don’t need every film directed at viewers thirty and older to be The King’s Speech; sometimes I just want to put myself in the hands of a clever director and screenwriter who can do exciting things for ninety minutes with a couple of attractive movie stars, and without prolonged fistfights between robots. Unfortunately, movies like this don’t lend themselves well to multiple installments, and recent attempts to launch franchises on a more manageable scale have mostly sputtered out. We don’t seem likely to see Chris Pine as Jack Ryan again, and the world isn’t exactly clamoring for a sequel to Jack Reacher, a movie I liked a lot.

All these decisions make good economic sense, at least to the extent that the studios are capable of behaving rationally. A few big bets, balanced out by Oscar contenders that can play throughout awards season, offer a better return on investment than a bunch of movies in the $50 million range. And I can’t fault them for giving up on a big swath of the population that doesn’t go to the movies anymore: these days, with my regular moviegoing a distant memory, I’m a member of the last demographic they should be taking into account. But it still feels like a loss. Many of the movies we remember most fondly emerged from a system that knew how to crank out decent escapist entertainment for adults; when a studio makes fifty films a year with talented directors and stars, eventually, you’ll get Casablanca. And while the gap between Casablanca and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit might seem laughably large, it’s hard to imagine the former emerging from a world that wasn’t interested in producing the latter. Art, at least of the kind that Hollywood has traditionally been most skilled at making, is a kind of numbers game, with great work emerging when the variables line up just right. And an industry that only releases either heavily marketed franchise fare or equally calculated awards bait seems unlikely to generate many accidental masterpieces.

This isn’t to say that excellent movies can’t arise where you least expect them. Edge of Tomorrow, for one, was fantastic, mostly because everyone involved seemed to care just a little bit more about the result than might have been strictly required. And the kind of storytelling I’m mourning here has migrated, with great success, to television, which does seem capable of yielding surprising triumphs of the form, like Hannibal. (You could even take the difference in quality between Hannibal and everything the movies have tried to do with Thomas Harris over the last fifteen years as a sign of how one medium is overtaking the other.) But just as publishers need a healthy midlist to sustain new voices and support good genre novels, the movies need a place where the contemporary equivalents of Michael Curtiz and Jacques Tourneur can thrive. I can’t help but think of Christopher McQuarrie, who won an Oscar two decades ago for The Usual Suspects, made The Way of the Gun—half superb, half totally ridiculous—and then bounced around endlessly from one unproduced project to another. He was rescued by Tom Cruise, who had done much the same years earlier for Robert Towne, directed Jack Reacher, and now he’s helming Mission: Impossible 5. I’m looking forward to it, but I also miss the dozen movies McQuarrie might have made in the meantime, if he had been lucky enough to work in an industry that had any idea what to do with him.