'Angels & Demons'

There are too many demons, too few angels and not nearly enough grace to save "Angels & Demons," the latest Dan Brown-inspired religious action thriller (three words you don't usually see together). Nail-biting, God-fearing and unfolding at a breakneck pace -- a little like "The Da Vinci Code" on celestial speed -- ultimately everything wilts under the weight of the complicated story lines of its many saints and sinners.

Tom Hanks is back, with much better hair, as Professor Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist we first encountered in 2006 cracking the Da Vinci Code and unlocking its Mona Lisa mysteries. In Langdon, Brown has created a cross between a claustrophobic Columbo of Catholicism and a biblically inclined Indiana Jones, and it's hard to imagine anyone but Hanks being able to pull off the role in any credible way.

Science and religion are at war here, an ages-old grudge match that goes back to a rift between Galileo and the Vatican, when freethinkers of all stripes were forced underground if they wanted to keep discussing crazy theories like the Earth spinning around the sun. Out of that repression, the Illuminati, a secret society, with a serious decoder system of churches and statues and rituals and words, was born.

Just when everyone thought they'd long since disappeared, four Cardinals are kidnapped on the eve of a conclave called to replace the pope, a progressive thinker who has conveniently died. The Illuminati is not only claiming responsibility but setting about to brand (yes, brand, as in molten metal searing skin) each of the Cardinals before killing them at the rate of one an hour and gruesomely staged for maximum effect. If that wasn't frightening enough, there are dark hints of the Vatican being consumed by light at the stroke of midnight.

Meanwhile (there is always a "meanwhile" in Dan Brown's densely plotted tomes), a prominent research facility in Geneva has succeeded in creating anti-matter, the substance that everything is made of. Creation, my friends, courtesy of colliding particles, and we get to see it. Though before we witness the Big Bang, those unseen particles -- dubbed "God particles" in case you've missed the allusions that have been falling around us like a hard rain -- race through a complex maze of underground pipes that look like they might carry sewage except they're polished to a blinding high sheen. Even a Hans Zimmer orchestration with lots of swells and cymbals (versus symbols) doesn't help.