Another bad Dan Brown novel gets made into another bad movie, writes DONALD CLARKE.

HERE'S A mind-bending conundrum for Dan Brown fans to consider. Four hundred and eighty three billion people (or something) went to see Ron Howard's powerfully narcoleptic film version of The Da Vinci Code. Yet you never seem to meet anybody who admits to actually enjoying the blasted thing.

Maybe you are one of those folk. Perhaps you all live on some unimaginably dull, undiscovered continent – Snoozonia sounds about right – where, in between reading the telephone directory and listening to drum solos from early Yes albums, you watch the Da Vincidirector's cut over and over again.

It’s time for Snoozonia to declare a national holiday. Pack your nightcaps into your drab little suitcases and make your way to the multiplex. The sequel to the most boring film of 2006 is crawling dozily into view.

The rest of the world could be excused for allowing itself some cautious optimism. Ron Howard is no fool and, in recent interviews, he has suggested that the script for the earlier film might have been a little too slavishly respectful to its source material. Perhaps there will be a little less jabbering and a few more garrottings.

Such hopes are quickly dashed. Angels & Demons, adapted from the predecessor to The Da Vinci Code , begins with a reasonably zippy, characteristically absurd prologue in the Cern particle physics facility. A portion of antimatter is stolen from the laboratory and transported to the Vatican, where the world's Cardinals are gathering to elect a new pope.

But what’s this? Several of the main contenders have been kidnapped and a potentially apocalyptic device, fashioned from that antimatter, has been placed beneath the streets of the ancient city. The diabolical plot is, it appears, the work of the Illuminati, a shadowy gang of religious dissenters, and the only man who can disentangle their plans is muttery Prof Robert Langdon of Harvard University.

Once the Vatican spooks corner Langdon (yet again, played by Tom Hanks’s furrowed brow), the film, hitherto bearable, spirals off into the same murky, talky gibberish that rendered the first episode so singularly indigestible.

The dialogue consists of a vast swathe of tedious footnotes to a book no sane person would ever wish to read. Want to hear 800 words on a dubious misreading of Galileos attitude to the Vatican? No? Tough luck, you're going to hear it anyway. Interested in an absurd distortion of the reasons why some physicists describe Higgs boson as the "God particle"? Here it comes. Want to learn about Bernini and the construction of St Peter's? Well, Kenneth Clark's classic Civilisationseries is available on DVD at a very reasonable price.

With all this nattering going on, you might reasonably wonder where the film-makers find the time to inject any action into proceedings. They don’t.

True, Father Ewan McGregor, a sort of locum pope, does get to fly a helicopter, and the professor does get locked in a library after closing time. But, for the most part, as in The Da Vinci Code, the film-makers are forced to use all their most vulgar skills to persuade viewers that conspicuously inert situations are, in fact, teeming with hidden tension. Nine times out of 10 this involves spinning the camera around the characters while blaring out faux-Latin choruses modelled on the less subtle bits of Carmina Burana.

Robert sits chatting in a car with his largely uninvolved sidekick (Ayelet Zurer). The camera spins sickeningly. "Domine! Spomine! Pomine!"the male-voice choir bellows. Father Ewan looks at a book. More spinning. "Diablo! Spiablo! Felablo!" they all shout.

You’d think that this Spin’n’Orff technique could make even the weather forecast seem gripping, but it just serves to make a boring film more noisy and more nauseating. If they left off the anti-Latin screeching, then you might at least be able to catch a bit of a snooze.

So why didn’t Howard trim

away the nattering and offer us as lean a thriller as he could manage? Because, bafflingly, the dense conspiracy theories and mechanical dialogue are key elements of Mr Brown's Unique Selling Point. To deliver a Langdon film without all that garbage would be like delivering a Terminatorfilm without a killer robot.

Make that mistake and the billions who adored (or, at least, endured) The Da Vinci Codemight chose to emerge from obscurity and march on Howard Towers. Ron doesn't deserve that.

Directed by Ron Howard. Starring Tom Hanks, Ayelet Zurer, Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgård, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Pierfrancesco Favino 12A cert, gen release, 138 min *