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Back Shelf Beauties
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The Da Vinci Code The movie's tagline is, "So Dark the Con of Man," but So Deep the Sleep of Man (and Woman) who buys a ticket to The Da Vinci Code. I thought Poseidon was the disappointment of the summer, but I was too hasty. Poseidon should step aside for The Da Vinci Code (and gladly give up the shame). I truly hope the book is better than this movie. Tom Hanks stars as Robert Langdon - a Harvard professor of religious symbology visiting Paris during a book tour. He was supposed to meet the curator of the Louvre, Jacques Sauniere (Jean-Pierre Marielle), to discuss an urgent matter, but Sauniere has turned up dead with strange symbols and phrases written around and on his body. The french detective investigating the murder, Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), is convinced Langdon is the killer, but a mysterious and helpful cryptologist, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), has stepped in to help Langdon, because Sauniere is her estranged grandfather, and she believes there is something more afoot. The two team up to find the real killer (O.J. could use some help with that), but they are about to find out they have stumbled onto a mystery big enough to shake the world as we know it (it's HUGE, BIG, MASSIVE). What are Langdon and Sophie about to discover? Will they survive? The Da Vinci Code is a slow, uneventful, unexciting, overly twisty turny road to dissatisfaction. Sadly, all of the blame rests on the shoulders of director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (based on the novel by Dan Brown). Howard has taken what naturally should be an action packed thriller, and converted it into a sleep inducing jumbled mess of a film, while Goldsman puts forth dialogue and plot twists that are forgotten before you walk out of the theater. Revelation after revelation in the complicated story just fall off the screen with no drama, no climax and no excitement. Howard dramatically needs to accelerate the pace to wrap us up in the stunning, groundbreaking mystery Langdon and Sophie are trying to solve, but the movie just drags on and on. He mistakenly tries to go for a weighty and cerebral tone, when mind blowing is needed, but that might be because he can't deliver mind blowing the way we might demand. Chase scenes are impossible to follow as Howard chooses to shake the camera and focus on faces instead of showing us the vehicles making rapid, death defying getaways. He even fails to give us a thrill in the biggest, most dramatic scene of the movie, which ends up with no punch and depends on the audience denying what we have seen with our own eyes to make it work. The writing isn't much better. Scenes where Langdon and Sophie are supposed to be solving puzzles could be jazzed up with better, quicker patter between the two brainiacs, but Goldsman delivers poorly written dialogue that does not captivate our imagination or bring us along for the ride as we see the mental Olympics the two go through to reach their conclusions. Worst of all, the dialogue and lack of pace don't convey a sense of urgency and passion, and the audience (at least this member of the audience) loses track of who is who, who is bad, who is good and the goal of each group in the movie. Ultimately, Goldsman (and this is probably taken directly from the book, which I didn't read because I like to judge the films on their own merits) gives us a predictable and sappy ending. YUCK. Howard doesn't totally fail. I liked how he melded in the characters' backgrounds as quick little flashbacks that succinctly, but thoroughly, tell us what we need to know about them. Also, he does a great job mixing in flashbacks of history, which gives us a chance to watch Sophie and Langdon walk around an area pointing to what we should pay attention to, while mixed in with a live recreation of the story they are telling. Both Howard and Goldsman are much better than this, and I am sure they will go on to create award winning work again, but The Da Vinci Code will be an albatross around their necks until their next great film. Sadly, even Hanks does not emerge unscathed from the film. He has no life to him, and doesn't get a chance to act and captivate us as Langdon goes from scene to scene without great dialogue to describe his thought patterns. I swear you look into Hanks' eyes and you can tell he's thinking, "I got a goofy haircut for THIS?!?!" Meanwhile, co-star Ian McKellen, who plays an old confidante of Langdon, steals every scene he is in and has the only spark of anybody in the movie. McKellen gets all of the great lines, and relishes every moment, while Paul Bettany, playing the infamous Silas, makes the character almost too weird, freaky and unstable to be scary As if all of this is not enough to turn you off of The Da Vinci Code (and, as if you are still reading at this point), Howard stomps on the film once last time by giving us a marathon three sequence ending. At two and half hours, I just wanted to scream at the screen, "GET IT OVER WITH!" You might, too. 1 Waffle (Out Of 4) Copyright 2006 - WaffleMovies.com
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