The Da Vinci Code

Review by Jason Gaston

What if the church was covering up something?   Okay, something else... something that would shake the very foundations of religious belief. Something that the church would be willing to kill to protect?

That's the gist of The Da Vinci Code, a movie based on a work of complete fiction that has religious nutballs all over the world crying foul. You know, it's just a movie. Relax. Have the same faith in people that you expect them to have and everything will be okay.

I mean, for God's sake, that crap-pile of a movie, Stigmata, had a similar premise and no one made a peep about it at the time. Lighten up!

Besides, it's really not that good of a movie!

The Da Vinci Code starts out with a murder at the Louvre and Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) soon gets caught up in a 2000 year-old web of lies and trickery that challenges the very divinity of Jesus and the church.

I would explain more of the plot but I'm all explained out. I just sit through a two and a half hour movie and it seems like everything got explained, then re-explained, and then explained some more. I swear, there was maybe... maybe ten minutes in this movie that something wasn't getting explained.

But that's the problem with making a movie based on an overcomplicated and over hyped best-seller like The Da Vinci Code. No matter how you split it, unless you are a brilliant director, your movie is going to come off as bloated and plodding, weighed down with too much information, too many ideas, and not enough energy to exploit them or make anyone care.

Call it information overload, but by the time Ian McKellan shows up in The Da Vinci Code and starts another long string of background information, I was almost past caring and had to fight not to tune out what was obviously important information.

It was like I was getting lectured to during this whole movie... by some very boring professors.

Speaking of very boring, let's talk about Tom Hanks. You can tell that this was a movie that he just wasn't very interested in. As a matter of fact, this is probably the least entertaining and most flat I've ever seen this man be in his entire career. Of course, you have to give him a little sympathy because he doesn't have a lot to go on. I've seen strings of paper dolls that are more three dimensional than the characters in this movie.

The only two actors who actually appear interesting in this movie are Paul Bentley and Ian McKellan. Bentley is a murderous albino monk who's devotion to his mission is frightening and sad while McKellan has a giddy time as a Holy Grail enthusiast.

This should have been an intelligent thriller and you can feel the bones of a great movie underneath it, but the plot is weighed down and the thrills... they just aren't there. This is a lumbering beast of a movie, weighed down by its own ludicrously complicated plot, hampered by bored actors in uninspired roles, and made tedious by a runtime that is about 45 minutes longer than it deserved.

A carwreck of flashbacks, exposition, and horrible accents, The Da Vinci Code is a thriller which falls asleep at the wheel and, yes, you can see twists and turns coming from a mile away.

I can only imagine that the novel is somewhat better because I can't imagine such a boring tale becoming such a huge phenomenon.