director
Ron Howard
screenwriter
Akiva Goldsman
based on
the novel by
Dan Brown
producers
John Calley
Brian Grazer
music
Hans Zimmer
cinematographer
Salvatore Totino
editors
Daniel P. Hanley
Mike Hill
cast
Tom Hanks (Robert Langdon)
Audrey Tautou (Sophie Neveu)
Ian McKellen (Sir Leigh Teabing)
Jean Reno (Captain Fache)
Paul Bettany (Silas)
Alfred Molina (Bishop Aringarosa)
Jürgen Prochnow (André Vernet)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 146m
u.s.
release: 5/19/06
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other ron
howard films
reviewed on this website:
- apollo
13
- a
beautiful mind
- ed
tv
- how the grinch stole christmas
- ransom
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Dan Brown's mega-bestseller
The Da Vinci Code presents some fairly radical ideas inside
a standard puzzle-box thriller. To make the medicine go down
even smoother, the film version reunites the whitebread couple
Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard, both of whom you would trust
to help your grandmother across the street. Their presence guarantees
a safe and unobjectionable evening at the movies. What it doesn't
guarantee is any excitement. In 1993, director Sydney Pollack
made the dire mistake of adapting John Grisham's potboiler The
Firm as a shadowy and serious melodrama, and Ron Howard
has duplicated that error here: Whereas Brown's novel has been
described as dumb fun, the film is no fun at all.
Sporting a ghastly medium-long
haircut that suggests a man with little time to look in the mirror,
Hanks mainly phones it in as noted symbologist Robert Langdon,
who becomes a suspect in the murder of a Louvre curator. Langdon
inspects the corpse, and the elaborate self-inscribed codes and
symbols on and near the corpse, and concludes that it means
something. But what? Ultimately, the plot's litany of hidden
messages leads to shocking evidence that Jesus Christ was not
the son of God, that he married Mary Magdalene, and that the
church was supposed to be pagan and goddess-centered, not monotheistic
and paternalistic. Have I lost you yet? There's also a self-flagellating
albino assassin (Paul Bettany) who kills people on orders from
the ultra-strict Catholic sect Opus Dei, which wants to keep
that evidence secret at all costs. Still with me?
Any movie with a skulking albino
assassin begs for campy, self-aware treatment, but Howard
and scripter Akiva Goldsman serve it all up straight-faced. The
studio has corralled what used to be called an international
cast -- Audrey Tautou, from Amelie, plays a "police
cryptographer" who helps Langdon; Sir Ian McKellen limps
into the film as some sort of historical expert and delivers
great chunks of exposition with wry aplomb; Jean Reno and Jurgen
Prochnow (oddly playing a Frenchman -- did Howard decide that
two French film stars were enough) turn up; Alfred Molina chews
some scenery as a shady bishop. They all look lost in the wind
produced by all the dead-serious theologizing and philosophizing.
The Da Vinci Code bids fair to be the talkiest, least
engaging number-one box-office hit since, well, The Firm.
Flailing to make Brown's art
history cinematic, Howard inserts grainy black-and-white flashbacks,
sets our heroes wandering through a town square filled with murky
historical figures, repeats his A
Beautiful Mind gimmick of visualizing the lead's unique
way of deciphering numbers. For the most part, though, you could
safely close your eyes and get the same experience you would
from listening to the audiobook. Your eyes may close anyway,
though, as the characters scurry around, doing Google searches
aboard a bus or escaping in the backs of vans or cars. An action
director Ron Howard is not, Exhibit A being the incomprehensibly
staged and edited car chase backwards through a crowded Paris
street. Howard made his name in comedies, and The Da Vinci
Code plays to none of his strengths -- aside from a few bits
from McKellen, there isn't a laugh (not intentional, anyway)
to be found in the film's yawning two hours and twenty-six minutes.
Not having read the book (I
gave up on it after about fifteen pages, insulted by the fifth-grade
reading level it appeared to be pitched at), and having no particular
team to root for in the great theological Super Bowl, I approached
The Da Vinci Code solely as a movie. I wasn't concerned
with how faithful an adaptation it was, or how credible its thesis
was; the many recent magazine cover stories on the alleged flaws
in Brown's premise have gone ignored by me. I just don't care.
The movie failed to make me care. At the very least, what The
Da Vinci Code says about Jesus and the Church makes for fun
speculation, and when Ian McKellen comes on and shows the supposed
hidden messages in "The Last Supper" the movie comes
close to being the cracking good yarn it should've been. The
Da Vinci Code needed a rousing, controversial director like
Oliver Stone, who would've stirred things up and shaken some
foundations. What we get here is very much in the Ron Howard
mold -- a movie scared of its own shadow, afraid to stand up
for its beliefs, and apparently deathly afraid to be entertaining.
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