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'The Da Vinci Code' lacks urgency, but still entertains

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Lightning didn't strike the screen and the theater didn't go up in hellfire, but that's not to say "The Da Vinci Code" won't raise some hackles.

Ron Howard's movie is extremely faithful to Dan Brown's best-seller. Basically, the more you liked the book, the more likely you are to like the movie. If you haven't read the book, the film version probably won't persuade you to pick it up. And why should you? You've already seen everything in it.

Sony Pictures

'The Da Vinci Code'

B-

The verdict: If you liked the book, you'll be fine.

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

Initially, "The Da Vinci Code" whips along with the same page-turner speed as the novel. And there's the same parade of multiple-endings, which makes it more than a little long. And the same chunks of religious/historical/art-major exposition, which makes it more than a little talky — though Howard does his best to disguise this by lingering on the gunplay and car chases and mad-monk murders, also all in the book.

Tom Hanks stars as Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology, in Paris to give a lecture. To his surprise, he's implicated — make that, all but convicted — in the murder of a highly respected curator at the Louvre who, in his dying moments, has managed to leave behind a cryptic message that's somehow tied to ... yes, Leonardo da Vinci!

The dead man is but the first step in a byzantine scavenger hunt that could crack open 2,000 years of Christian doctrine. With him every step of the way is French cop and cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), who may be more central to the mystery than either of them realize.

On their trail is detective Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), who's every bit as relentless as Tommy Lee Jones in "The Fugitive," and Silas (Paul Bettany), a tormented, self-flagellating Albino monk, who isn't above offing a nun. Robert and Sophie eventually find refuge with Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen), an old friend of Robert's who, like Monty Python, is obsessed with the Holy Grail.

And that's just the first half.

Howard uses desaturated flashbacks to fill in certain characters' back-stories. A few are fairly effective, but others are pure kitsch, like outtakes from some long-forgotten Cecil B. DeMille religious epic.

For those who don't know the book chapter and verse, things may get a little confusing. For those who do, things might get a little boring. Either way, Hanks, who initially seemed so miscast as a character described as "Harrison Ford in tweeds," is a big help, using his low-key everyman quality to give dimension to an essentially one-note role. He and Tautou lack chemistry — badly — but she manages her performance well enough to make this a plausible calling card for a Hollywood career. Bettany keeps his dignity intact in a frankly ludicrous role. And Reno has a fine Gallic scowl/two-day stubble.

However, the movie only really comes alive when McKellen appears. Nobody does playfully-eccentric-but-with-great-power better. He practically created the template as Gandalf in "The Lord of the Rings" movies. He brings the picture a much-needed lighter touch and sense of humor. Surrounded by police officers, he asks, "Did that old cannabis charge finally catch up with me?"

The film's "sacred feminine" premise, which has provoked so much controversy, certainly hasn't been cut from the picture. It remains the core of the movie's murder-mystery framework. But as the filmmakers have insisted all along, "The Da Vinci Code" is fiction. It's in the fiction section at the library, part of the best-selling fiction display at Borders and Barnes & Noble.

Rather than courting angry debate, Howard chooses to emphasize that there are two sides to any discussion. He and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have even added dialogue that makes Langdon something of a spokesman for Christian orthodoxy — which isn't in the book.

Still, it has to be said: The conservative group Opus Dei takes it on the chin, with the picture explicitly distancing their beliefs from the Vatican.

In Howard's version, Brown's intriguing — some say, radical, or worse — suppositions are posited somewhere between the Zapruder tape, the grassy knoll theory and rumors of JFK living like a veggie on a secret Greek island. More bluntly, it's hard to imagine how "The Da Vinci Code" could shake anyone's faith. In Howard perhaps, because he fails to figure out how to inject urgency in Brown's brainy-potboiler approach. But not in anything religious.

Rather than stirring up hatred, the movie attempts to open up a hopefully reasonable discourse. How do we sift truth from faith, Hanks says early on; later, he wonders if the revelation embraced by the movie would destroy faith or renew it. When Sophie asks Robert if what they've learned is possible, he replies, "It's not impossible."

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Nor does it need to be.

Ultimately "The Da Vinci Code" is an entertainment — an airplane read turned into a perfectly good airplane movie. The film is less interested in putting the very roots of Christianity up for grabs than it is in giving audiences an old-fashioned summer movie thrill ride. And if in doing so, it bumps into matters of individual faith, so much the better.