MOVIE REVIEW `The Da Vinci Code'
By KIRK HONEYCUTT
Wednesday, May 17 2006
Wednesday, May 17 2006
Published on AllBusiness.com
CANNES _ For those who hate Dan Brown's best-selling symbology thriller ``The Da Vinci Code,'' the eagerly awaited and much-hyped movie version beautifully exposes all its flaws and nightmares of logic. For those who love the book's page-turning intensity, the movie version heightens Brown's mischievous interweaving of genre action, historical facts and utter fictions. In other words, for those who bear witness to the film ``The Da Vinci Code,'' what you see depends on what you believe. Kinda like religion itself.
Strictly as a movie and ignoring the current swirl of controversy no amount of studio money could ever buy, the Ron Howard-directed film features one of Tom Hanks' more remote, even wooden performances in a role that admittedly demands all the wrong sort of things from a thriller protagonist; an only slightly more animated performance from his French co-star, Audrey Tautou; and polished Hollywood production values where camera cranes sweep viewers up to God-like points of view and famous locations and deliciously sinister interiors heighten tension where the movie threatens to turn into a historical treatise. The movie really only catches fire at the midway point, when Ian McKellen hobbles on the scene as the story's Sphinx-like Sir Leigh Teabing. Here is the one actor having fun with his role and playing a character rather than a piece to a puzzle.
True believers and those who want to understand what all the fuss is about will jam cinemas worldwide in the coming weeks in sufficient numbers so as to fulfill probably even the most optimistic projections of Sony execs. But the movie is so drenched in dialogue musing over arcane mythological and historical lore and scenes grow so static that even camera movement can't disguise the dramatic inertia. Such sins could cut into those rosy projections.
For those who vacationed on Mars for the past few years, ``The Da Vinci Code'' is the second of Brown's thrillers starring Harvard professor of iconography and religious art Robert Langdon (Hanks). The books seek to put contemporary ticking bombs into dusty historical disputes. In this one, the murder of a highly respected curator in the Louvre in Paris, where Langdon fortuitously happens to be while on a speaking engagement, embroils the professor in a race against time to locate nothing less than the Holy Grail.
His companion is police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Tautou), and his seeming nemesis is bulldog police captain Bezu Fache (Jean Reno, largely wasted), who for no plausible reason believes Langdon to be the killer. But other potential villains loom: Jet-setting Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), from the ultraconservative Opus Dei branch of Catholicism, and Silas, an albino-monk assassin (Paul Bettany).
The plot is driven not by its characters but by solutions of puzzles, the breaking of codes and a dazzling display of historical
Strictly as a movie and ignoring the current swirl of controversy no amount of studio money could ever buy, the Ron Howard-directed film features one of Tom Hanks' more remote, even wooden performances in a role that admittedly demands all the wrong sort of things from a thriller protagonist; an only slightly more animated performance from his French co-star, Audrey Tautou; and polished Hollywood production values where camera cranes sweep viewers up to God-like points of view and famous locations and deliciously sinister interiors heighten tension where the movie threatens to turn into a historical treatise. The movie really only catches fire at the midway point, when Ian McKellen hobbles on the scene as the story's Sphinx-like Sir Leigh Teabing. Here is the one actor having fun with his role and playing a character rather than a piece to a puzzle.
True believers and those who want to understand what all the fuss is about will jam cinemas worldwide in the coming weeks in sufficient numbers so as to fulfill probably even the most optimistic projections of Sony execs. But the movie is so drenched in dialogue musing over arcane mythological and historical lore and scenes grow so static that even camera movement can't disguise the dramatic inertia. Such sins could cut into those rosy projections.
For those who vacationed on Mars for the past few years, ``The Da Vinci Code'' is the second of Brown's thrillers starring Harvard professor of iconography and religious art Robert Langdon (Hanks). The books seek to put contemporary ticking bombs into dusty historical disputes. In this one, the murder of a highly respected curator in the Louvre in Paris, where Langdon fortuitously happens to be while on a speaking engagement, embroils the professor in a race against time to locate nothing less than the Holy Grail.
His companion is police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Tautou), and his seeming nemesis is bulldog police captain Bezu Fache (Jean Reno, largely wasted), who for no plausible reason believes Langdon to be the killer. But other potential villains loom: Jet-setting Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), from the ultraconservative Opus Dei branch of Catholicism, and Silas, an albino-monk assassin (Paul Bettany).
The plot is driven not by its characters but by solutions of puzzles, the breaking of codes and a dazzling display of historical
