Screenplay: Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Dan Brown
Directed by: Ron Howard
The chief mystery of Ron Howard's adaptation of The Da Vinci Code is why God-fearing Christians are sweating over this snore of a flick. Sure, the ideas are still as inflammatory and/or intriguing as they were in Dan Brown's novel, but where'd the crackerjack pacing go? Time will zip along much faster if you choose to spend ten hours reading the book instead.
Whether or not you’re a fan, any attentive viewer not lulled into soothing, restful sleep will be five steps ahead of Robert Langton (poor, miscast Tom Hanks) at all times. A celebrated symbologist - real job, apparently - on the Paris lecture circuit, Langton is rapidly shanghaied into a conspiracy of literally biblical proportions when someone he’s never met and doesn’t know is murdered in the Louvre. Why? Because the dead man’s dying act was to write Langton’s name down. Why? Because only Langton can decipher the trail of symbol-clues that will keep the conspiracy alive.
Unfortunately, it also convinces police captain Fache (poor, misused Jean Reno) that Langton is the killer.
Rather than produce five hundred lecture-attending witnesses as his alibi, Langton goes on the run with cryptographer Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), niece of the deceased. Giving Fache the slip is kid stuff, but the real killer - murderous albino monk Silas (Paul Bettany) - is harder to shake. Langton soon realizes he’s in the middle of a secret war between two ancient Christian societies: ultra-orthodox Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion, supposed guardians of the Holy Grail. They've been at it for two millennia, but it's all getting sorted out in the next 24 hours. In the balance is a secret that could shake the very foundations of Christianity to its core.Sounds exciting, right?
The thing is, Langton doesn’t actually do much. Which is to say, anything.
Langton is a hapless passenger in this film, constantly being taken places by people he barely knows to discover... something. Which is then baldly explained to him, as when Grail enthusiast Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen) hands him virtually all the answers in a single twenty-minute lecture. Nothing is earned. Little is overcome. Langton even spends one key confrontation unconscious. Bookish protagonists are one thing, but Langton just doesn’t seem very interested in who murdered who or why. It’s just that nobody’s told him he can simply stop and get off this ride. So onward he goes, blindly following the straight-line, surprise-free plot.
Seriously. Our heroes are all so languid that the bad guys have to dispatch themselves.
You also have to wonder how terrible the discovery of The Secret would actually be, since everybody in Opus Dei knows it and it doesn’t seem to have affected their faith much.
In fairness, Ron Howard’s made a great-looking film, and McKellen (perhaps a better candidate to play Langton than Hanks) injects some amusing character moments. It’s also fair to say when you walk out thinking mostly about the music, you know it was a train wreck. Nothing covers Langton’s near-total inaction. Not the dozen flashbacks, historical and personal, that stop the narrative dead in order to explain things. Not the unending series of kid-simple clues, discovered and solved and checked off without any detectable emotion. Not the hype or the world-wide phenomenon that now defines The Da Vinci Code. Instead of an engrossing puzzle-box thriller, what you have here is an extended exercise in waiting. Waiting for things that won’t ever happen. Waiting for the mannequins on screen to catch up. Waiting for it to end, wishing you could just skip to the last page.
Does that sound like a good date to you?
DATE MOVIE POTENIAL: RED LIGHT
Do you really want your first common experience to be a bad one? The best you can hope for is a first sleepover when one of you involuntarily looses consciousness somewhere in the second hour. Coma-like behavior and mouth drool are sexy, man!
