The Da Vinci Code Movie Review

Ron Howard and Tom Hanks miss the boat with this uninspired and flat adaptation of Dan Brown’s controversial bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. It’s sad (even disturbing) to admit but those who’ve banned the film may actually have done potential ticket buyers a favor.

Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman stuck closely to Brown’s story, adapting the author’s dialogue-driven plot into a talky movie that, when words fail, relies on reenactments of historical events to get the key points across. Brown’s novel was a real page-turner. Although not the most well-written book ever to land on bestseller lists, it still offered readers an entertaining journey to go on with the story's fictional characters. Somehow that fun journey has been translated to the screen as a dreary, colorless, and plodding adventure.

Both the novel and the film begin with the murder of Louvre director Jacques Sauniere at the hands of a monk who belongs to the Catholic organization known as Opus Dei. In Paris on a book tour, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Hanks) is brought into the case by Detective Bezu Fache (Jean Reno) who wants the renowned scholar to decipher a baffling clue left on and around Sauniere's body by the deceased man himself.

Langdon’s almost immediately joined at the scene of the crime by French cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), Sauniere’s estranged granddaughter. It’s soon revealed that Sauniere was a member of a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, a group charged with guarding a powerful secret about Jesus and Mary Magdalene's relationship and its connection to the mysteries of the Holy Grail. Langdon and Neveu must follow the trail of clues left by Sauniere in order to save the group's precious secret from being lost forever.

In addition to a few new little plot twists and some storyline omissions, the lead characters have been altered from book to the screen. Sophie Neveu was strong, quick on the uptake, and self-assured in Brown’s book. Onscreen she’s…I don’t want to say ‘dumbed down’…but just pushed into more of a secondary position intellectually to Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon. Fans of the novel are well aware of Sophie’s part in helping Langdon escape from the Louvre and her involvement in figuring out key clues her grandfather left behind before being murdered. In one of the pivotal scenes in Brown’s novel, Sophie beats the two scholarly men to the punch when she figures out the language of a critical clue. In the movie version, it’s reversed. The men prove superior to Sophie at solving the language puzzle.

Sophie is more of a bystander as the men take the lead which, to me, is just a bizarre way to present a movie where so much of the story has to do with the strength of women and the sacred feminine. Why diminish the one female character in the film?

The Robert Langdon character is also noticeably different from the way Brown wrote him (and we’re not just talking about the character’s physical presence or Hanks’ bizarre hairstyle). The film’s Langdon is more of a skeptic than he is in the book. A portion of his backbone’s been removed in the film adaptation, and he all but pooh-poohs some of Sir Leigh Teabing's (Langdon's friend and a renowned Grail expert) ideas instead of helping to fill in the blanks. The narrative also suffers from the failure to mention Langdon’s upcoming book, which is what connects Langdon to the murdered director of the Louvre and the secretive Priory of Sion.

Brown’s book was heavy on action, a real thrill ride with the two lead characters working as a team to decipher a series of clues and anagrams that ultimately lead them to the book’s version of the truth about the Holy Grail. The Da Vinci Code movie never captures that same sense of adventure. Langdon was like a kid in the candy store in the book, albeit under dangerous circumstances with people out to kill him. But in the movie he’s joyless and never exhibits any excitement while on the hunt for the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.

Continued on Page 2: Rating the Performances and the Final Grade