The Da Vinci Code - Austin American-Statesman movie review

'Da Vinci' gets bogged down by its own code

By JOHN DeFORE
Austin American-Statesman

As allegedly blasphemous movies go, "The Da Vinci Code" isn't fit to wash the feet of "The Last Temptation of Christ." That 1988 film tested boundaries in an honest attempt to understand the human/divine nature of Jesus, while this new one is simply a thriller — one that has roughly as much to say about religion as "Mission: Impossible III" offers on geopolitics.

Sony Pictures

'The Da Vinci Code'

2 out of 5 stars

Director: Ron Howard
Starring: Tom Hanks, Jean Reno, Audrey Tautou, Alfred Molina, Ian McKellen
Run time: 149 minutes
Release date: May 19, 2006
Rating: PG-13 for disturbing images, violence, some nudity, thematic material, brief drug references and sexual content.
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Sneak peek
Take an advance look at action in "The Da Vinci Code" with these stills from the movie.

Decoding the story
• Insightful storytelling or historical blunders?
• Who was the real da Vinci?
• What did early Christians really say about Jesus?

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

Unfortunately, as popcorn-munchers go, this 2 1/2-hour yarn is pretty unthrilling. The kinds of things that might make a book ideal for airport reading (a self-importantly urgent tempo, endless expository dialogue, just enough recognizable history to convince readers they're learning something) don't make for much fun in a Ron Howard movie.

I say this about the movie alone, having avoided the book entirely. (My interest in dark Vatican conspiracies waned back when the Hardy Boys solved "The Case of the Pope's Missing Slippers.") Judged solely as a summer blockbuster, it's hard to imagine anyone getting worked up about "Da Vinci," pro or con.

Things start well enough, with a panicked old man being chased through the moonlit Louvre by a limping, white-haired monk. The man is murdered, but takes a long time to die. After his killer runs home for some gory self-flagellation, the victim hobbles around the famous galleries planting riddles in the hopes that just the right puzzle-solver will find them. (Why he doesn't just find a phone and deliver his message straight is a mystery for another book.)

Enter Tom Hanks, a scholar of symbols, and Audrey Tautou, cryptographer. Both actors have carried other films easily, but in bowing to this one's ersatz seriousness they become terribly dull. The mystery they uncover sounds like fun — stuff about the Holy Grail, knights protecting it, nefarious clergymen and a blasphemous secret about Jesus' wife and kids — but there's so much of it for Hanks to recount, seminar-style, that the story's codes and riddles have little room to breathe.

It falls to Ian McKellen, as an eccentric Grail scholar, to bring some color to the film. He's used to energizing long fantasy films, but J.R.R. Tolkien gave him a lot more to work with than Dan Brown did.