Directed by: Ron Howard

Starring: Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgard

MPAA rating: PG13 (for violence)

Running time: 138 minutes

Best suited for: fans of Dan Brown and Tom Hanks

Least suited for: those who hate formulaic third-act twists, insisting we'll be ohsomuchhappier with intentional misdirection and astute (wink, wink) cleverness than with sound, reasonable story lines with credible plots

For nearly two hours, Ron Howard's "Angels and Demons" is a near flawless thriller set in the incredibly intriguing 110-acre nation known as the Vatican. The film is being touted as the sequel to 2006's mega-hit "The Da Vinci Code," although Dan Brown wrote "Angels and Demons" earlier, to very little fanfare. I suspect, however, that Hollywood smells a franchise.

Like "The Da Vinci Code," "Angels and Demons" stars Tom Hanks as symbologist Robert Langdon, who once again presumes to expose the Catholic Church as a dark, mysterious place of ageless and lethal inner conflicts. The story here, too, feeds off centuries of secrecy and the Church's sometimes less than stellar history. And, once again, the Catholic Church is less than happy to be vilified by Hollywood.

This time I happen to agree with them.

Unlike the somewhat convoluted beginning of its predecessor, "Angels and Demons" opens as a straightforward and surprisingly hi-tech murder mystery.

A pope has suddenly died. Four cardinals have been kidnapped. And someone has stolen a morsel of contained antimatter from a science facility in Geneva. As every Trekkie and theoretical physicist knows, combining antimatter with matter will produce catastrophic effects akin to a small nuclear detonation.

Apparently the antimatter thief has a quarrel with the Catholic Church. Something about the recent, and intensifying, dispute between science and religion. The thief has hidden the stolen antimatter somewhere in the Vatican, whichwill explode at midnight because—well, because it just will—and the clock is ticking. Agnostic Robert Langdon is reluctantly asked by Vatican police to translate some peculiar symbols related to the crime.

As previously stated, "Angels and Demons" opens with panache—with Langdon quickly in the thick of things, under the disapproving frowns of Vatican authorities, who don't appreciate his fickle faithlessness.

Like it or not, the Vatican does provide a rather nifty environment for a murder mystery. It's the perfect place for cops and robbers, for good and evil, for angels and demons. And the film does a nice job of revealing just enough information—about both the politics of the pontiff and the mystery at hand— to keep the plot humming.

Rare for this kind of faithbased whodunit (where the Church is presumed to be guilty of something), there's even the refreshing face of Father McKenna (Ewan McGregor)— young and astute, the perfect poster boy for the Vatican of tomorrow. McKenna is, in fact, cinema's best father figure since Bing Crosby in "Going My Way."

For a while, it seems as if McKenna and Langdon may team up to solve this crisis, crawling (whilst philosophizing on the pros and cons of faith, of course) around the mysterious, skullstrewn labyrinths beneath Rome. That, in fact, would have worked for me, as the killer is astute enough and the locale surreal enough to sustain credibility and keep an audience hooked.

But Hollywood (like the Church) has a penchant for grand, inexplicable finales. What happens is—well, I can't tell you. But let's just say that somebody decided it was time for pyrotechnics and twists even trickier than navigating the ancient catacombs. Sure, director Howard is responsible for a certain amount of faithfulness to Dan Brown's book—but in my opinion he's responsible to the audience, too.

"Angels and Demons" breaks no real new ground—instead, it teases us with potential, only to yank it away and replace new possibilities with the same old stuff, the regurgitated familiarity of spoon-fed mundaneness.

One day Hollywood's going to wake up and realize that by forgoing the last-act fireworks, by not pulling some poor, befuddled last-minute rabbit out of a hat— by instead stepping out on a limb and offering bold new possibilities (or even a quiet finale that will at least make us think), it will have produced a film worth remembering. Worth thinking about.

In the meanwhile, mediocrity prevails.