What happened to reliable old Tom Hanks?

"Angels and Demons" raises important questions about the intersection of faith and technology.

Here's one: Does Tom Hanks really want us to believe that's not a weave?

Hanks' initial appearance is like an ad for Hair Club for Men - he climbs manfully out of a pool, giving everyone a look at how realistically his hair clings to his head.

It may also be a baptism metaphor, not the only one that appears in "Angels and Demons," in which Robert Langdon, Dan Brown's atheist detective, goes into the heart of Vatican City to save the Church from an ancient threat.

Langdon in the Vatican? Saving the Church? The Lord works in mysterious ways, so Langdon gets a good dunking and possible sanctification before he takes his heretical, scientific mind to Rome to address an urgent mystery that's stumped Vatican authorities.

The pope is dead, and while the cardinals convene to select another, a fanatical group called The Illuminati, with a 400-year-old grudge against the church, has kidnapped four papal candidates, vowing to kill them in succession before blowing up the Vatican with a new-fangled particle bomb.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the Italian physicist (Ayelet Zurer) who isolated the particle is gorgeous, perhaps even sexier than Jessica Alba's "Fantastic Four" physicist, but, as a brunette, more believable.

She accompanies Langdon as he scours the Vatican archives for clues, and races around Rome trying to save the abductees and find the hidden device. Her purpose is to defuse the bomb, and to defuse the fact that Hanks looks like he's embalmed.

What happened to reliable old Tom, perennial Oscar nominee? It's like he left the actor part of him on that island in "Castaway." In the old days, you could not have miscast him. Now, he looks sadly out of place. His persona is a resourceful everyman, and Langdon, the smirking Harvard know-it-all, does not look good on him. Plus, there's something in Hanks' face that tells us that he knows that the franchise is a trashy paycheck.

And you don't have to be a Harvard symbolist to figure out what Ron Howard is up to here - the way he uses Armin Mueller Stahl and Stellan Skarsgard as Vatican heavies, the way he deploys the boyish appeal of Ewan McGregor as papal loyalist.

Still, the movie is much more slickly made (it's like "Seven" meets "National Treasure" meets "CSI: Vatican") and less painful to sit through than "The Da Vinci Code," a movie so awful it made only $750 million.

I wonder if there's a similar jackpot in store for "A&D," slick as it is. It treats the Church irreverently, but does not pretend to have any blockbuster revelations about Jesus and Mary.

It may turn out that a movie hardly worth boycotting is hardly worth seeing.