The Da Vinci Code - Palm Beach Post movie review

'Da Vinci': Not the blasphemous blockbuster you expected

By HAP ERSTEIN
Palm Beach Post

No art history text, nor any religious genealogy thesis, has ever made its way onto the bestseller list. That is, until Dan Brown's wildly popular novel The Da Vinci Code, which demonstrated how to sell 40 million copies of heady fiction by wrapping it around a police procedural thriller.

But one man's page turner is another's blasphemy, which only served to magnify the controversy surrounding the tale and to increase its sales. Of course, it was then inevitable that Hollywood would grab onto Brown's Code and try to harness it for the screen as a mass market entertainment.

Sony Pictures

'The Da Vinci Code'

The verdict: A worthy, but unremarkable rendering of Brown's hugely successful, controversial religious thriller.

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

Taking a crack at the high-profile task is director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning team that gave us the similarly cryptic, factually dubious, but far less theological A Beautiful Mind five years ago.

For starters, they have cast the film well, beginning with the credibility-infusing Tom Hanks as Harvard professor of religious symbology Robert Langdon, who becomes implicated in the murder of a Louvre museum curator. Soon, like any Hitchcockian "wrong man," he is on the run from the French authorities, with comely cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Amelie's Audrey Tautou) in tow.

In this instance, the dead man left behind a trail of riddles, anagrams and brain teasers that points them to the art of Leonardo Da Vinci. Leo embedded his own clues in the paintings, suggesting that a less-than-divine Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene — the true Holy Grail. What's more, they had a daughter, whose blood line may survive to the present day.

Such an incendiary accusation has other mysterious groups on Langdon's tail — the malevolent Roman Catholic Opus Dei out to destroy evidence of Magdalene's exalted connection, as well as such secret brotherhoods as the Priory of Sion and the Knights Templar out to preserve it.

As you might imagine, The Da Vinci Code does not fit easily into the time-tested formulas of turn-off-your-mind action-adventure flicks. As engaging as it is, the film suffers from falling between genres. The plot is by necessity very wordy and complex, which gets in the way of it being a pure popcorn movie. On the other hand, the many attractive cinematic sequences, as Langdon and Neveu careen through Paris, the French countryside and on to London, mean that some of the details of the book's religious supposition — wrongheaded or not — never make it into the film.

Howard may have crafted the best possible movie version of Brown's novel, but only occasionally does it have visually inventive equivalents of the book's alchemy. One example certainly is the impromptu lecture by wealthy Holy Grail devotee Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen) on Da Vinci's Last Supper, in which the painted subjects move about the work illustrating his premises. Another, oddly enough, is the final sequence in which Langdon returns to the Louvre, a new punch line added by Goldsman.

The busy McKellen, who returns again next week in X-Men 3, is deliciously plummy as Teabing. He gives one of a handful of vivid supporting performances that includes Paul Bettany as the self-flagellating albino Silas and the reliable Jean Reno as the Paris gendarme who is stubbornly convinced of Langdon's guilt.

Hanks is fine in the starring role, but he overplays the stiffness that conveys the high stakes of his quest. Tautou gets by on her Audrey Hepburn-esque looks, but sounds like she is still struggling with the English language.

Chances are the group that will most enjoy the movie of The Da Vinci Code are those who have not read the book and are not predisposed against its premise. Those who were hoping the movie would soften Brown's shin-kicks at the church will surely be disappointed. If you are among those who object to his heretical implications, feel free to stay home and not give Sony Pictures any of your money. It seems unlikely that it will miss it.