Pun Salad

Mrs. Salad has been a Catholic all her life, so she's always up for a thriller that involves skullduggery at the Holy See. Hence we made one of our rare trips to an actual theater to see this before it vanished.

We thought we were avoiding the crowd, but it was sold out when we tried to get in Saturday night; we finally made it in on Sunday. It was merely in sixth place in the national weekend boxoffice rankings. Its popularity here may be due to Dan Brown being a local hero.

Tom Hanks reprises his role from The Da Vinci Code, Harvard "symbologist" Robert Langdon. He's wisked off to Rome when the four leading candidates to replace the recently-deceased Pope get kidnapped and threatened with death. If that wasn't enough: the bad guys have also stolen a small chunk of antimatter from CERN's Large Hadron Collider which they threaten to release from its containment. Which would, of course, be bad.

Fortunately, the bad guys have also left plenty of incomprehensible clues involving statues, old texts, ancient societies, obscure history, etc., which is why Langdon comes in handy. (If the bad guys hadn't done that, he'd be worse than useless.) He's accompanied by a foxy CERN physicist, and has to deal with a number of Vatican folks. There's a lot of derring-do, running, dodging, explosions, gunplay, and as near as I can tell, Tom Hanks keeps the same expression on his face the entire time. He's a funny guy, they should give him a couple jokes.

The plot is, of course, absurd, nine ways from Sunday. I asked myself on the way out what the point of the bad guy's elaborate scheme was supposed to be. I couldn't come up with one.