USA, PG-13, 149 m, 2006
Directed by Ron Howard. Stars Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellan, et al. 

The unfathomable success of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code all but insures boffo box office for this so-so movie treatment. What the critics have to say about it won’t impact its success one way or the other; the picture has a built-in audience umpteen-million strong, and I’m afraid the hullabaloo whipped up by the picture’s Catholic detractors will only serve to put more bums on seats. (Of course, you wouldn’t see Hollywood having this kinda fun ‘n’ games with the Koran; Muslim protests aren’t as well-mannered as those put on by, say, Lutherans or Jehovah’s Witnesses.) Ron Howard strikes me as an uninspired choice to helm this thing; he lacks vision. (Most of his films play as if they were put together by a committee.) But that could explain why the studio honchos elected to go with Opie; his style (or lack thereof) isn’t going to get in the way of Akiva Goldsman’s verbose script. Indeed, The Da Vinci Code closely traces its literary source, and it feels hemmed in by the written word the same way the first two Harry Potter pictures did.  Still, it’s dumb fun—just the right thing to get your mind off the summer’s muggier days. A dour, slightly rumpled Tom Hanks plays Dr. Robert Langdon, an American religious symbologist who teams up with a French police cryptologist (lovely, lovely, lovely Audrey Tautou) to get to the bottom of a homicide that winds up leading to one of the biggest religious conspiracies of all time. There’s strong supporting work from Ian McKellan as Sir Leigh Teabing, a learned chappie who points Langdon to clues hidden in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper—clues that threaten to strike at the foundation of Christianity. Needless to say, if this nonsense compromises your faith in the Almighty, then it probably wasn't very strong to begin with.

July 15, 2006

© Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.