The Da Vinci Code Reviews

'The Da Vinci Code' is one of the highest grossing movies ever, despite this, it is was not well received! And what did I think of it? Well when it started I didn't find it that bad! It goes on for 2 and a half hours and the final 45 minutes were dull! I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would but why does Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) have that weird hair? 

'The Da Vinci Code' is pretty much a dull adaptation of the novel! As for the cast, the cast try hard (Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Jean Reno, Paul Bettany) but only Ian McKellen rises above the material!

If this movie had been 2 hours long, it might not have become more average! But sadly, thanks to the last 45 minutes, it became mediocre! I didn't hate it, I didn't love it, I didn't like it though! Is it even decent? Sadly not!

When the word came out that they were making a movie adaptation, there was a huge buzz about it. Eventually, even though it made some big bucks at the box-office, it wasn’t very well received. Eventually, I saw it a few years later after borrowing the DVD from a colleague and even though I had some rather low expectations, I don’t think it was so bad after all. Indeed, I thought it was actually a fairly entertaining thriller and it was fun to see an American thriller taking place in France for once. Of course, since half of the book (which I have read afterwards) was actually about Robert Langdon giving some historical or mythical background, it didn’t translate well to the silver screen. Furthermore, even though it was indeed a fun book, it was actually not really brilliant in my opinion. I mean, Dan Brown basically deals with historical facts, wild theories, improbable legends and fairy tales in the same way at face value and, as a result, it was difficult for me to take the whole thing seriously. Furthermore, I don’t really get all the fuss against this movie. I mean, as if the book was really brilliant to start with. I have to admit it, even though it was definitely entertaining, it was far from being a masterpiece but the makers did their best with this material and the end-result was not even half as bad as everyone claimed. To conclude, of course, it is not really anything amazing, but I still think the movie is actually a decent blockbuster and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

The arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not been going on for millennia — it only feels that way — but part of Columbia Pictures' ingenious marketing strategy has been to encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone to see the picture until the very last minute. Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus and Mary Magdalene's prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised: Is Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti-Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair?

Luckily I lack the learning to address the first two questions. As for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. "The Da Vinci Code," which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. (Curiously enough Mr. Howard accomplished a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.)

To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.

To be fair, though, Mr. Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers," Audrey Tautou hisses to Paul Bettany (who play a less than enormous, short-haired albino). "He burns them!"

Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da Vinci Code" is above all a murder mystery. And as such, once it gets going, Mr. Howard's movie has its pleasures. He and Mr. Goldsman have deftly rearranged some elements of the plot (I'm going to be careful here not to spoil anything), unkinking a few over-elaborate twists and introducing others that keep the action moving along.

Hans Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop-romantic with some liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise be talky and inert. The movie does, however, take a while to accelerate, popping the clutch and leaving rubber on the road as it tries to establish who is who, what they're doing and why.

Briefly stated: An old man (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is killed after hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a hooded assailant. Meanwhile Robert Langdon (Mr. Hanks), a professor of religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing books for fans. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a French policemen who seems very grouchy, perhaps because his department has cut back on its shaving cream budget.

Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer and also — Bezu Fache! — the murder victim's granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some very important secrets, which if they were ever revealed might shake the foundations of Western Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) is at this very moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.

A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It skids through the nighttime streets of Paris and eventually to London the next morning, with side trips to a Roman castle and a chateau in the French countryside. Along the way the film pauses to admire various knickknacks and art works, and to flash back, in desaturated color, to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters (Langdon falls down a well; Sophie's parents are killed in a car accident; Silas stabs his abusive father).

There are also glances further back into history, to Constantine's conversion, to the suppression of the Knights Templar and to that time in London when people walked around wearing powdered wigs.

Through it all Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Mr. Hanks twists his mouth in what appears to be an expression of professorial skepticism and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality. Ms. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of worried fatigue.

In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.

But thank the deity of your choice for Ian McKellen, who shows up just in time to give "The Da Vinci Code" a jolt of mischievous life. He plays a wealthy and eccentric British scholar named Leigh Teabing. (I will give Mr. Brown this much: he's good at names. If I ever have twins or French poodles, I'm calling them Bezu and Teabing for sure.)

Hobbling around on two canes, growling at his manservant, Remy (Jean-Yves Berteloot), Teabing is twinkly and avuncular one moment, barking mad the next. Sir Ian, rattling on about Italian paintings and medieval statues, seems to be having the time of his life, and his high spirits serve as something of a rebuke to the filmmakers, who should be having and providing a lot more fun.

Teabing, who strolls out of English detective fiction by way of a Tintin comic, is a marvelously absurd creature, and Sir Ian, in the best tradition of British actors slumming and hamming through American movies, gives a performance in which high conviction is indistinguishable from high camp. A little more of this — a more acute sense of its own ridiculousness — would have given "The Da Vinci Code" some of the lightness of an old-fashioned, jet-setting Euro-thriller.

But of course movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Jesus or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema such matters are best left to Monty Python. In any case Mr. Howard and Mr. Goldsman handle the supposedly provocative material in Mr. Brown's book with kid gloves, settling on an utterly safe set of conclusions about faith and its history, presented with the usual dull sententiousness.

So I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.

''What really matters is what you believe.''

A murder inside the Louvre and clues in Da Vinci paintings lead to the discovery of a religious mystery protected by a secret society for two thousand years -- which could shake the foundations of Christianity.

Tom Hanks: Dr. Robert Langdon

A curator is murdered in Paris's revered Louvre Museum. The French police, lead by Leutenant Bezu Fache(Jean Reno) call on the expertise of Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), an expert in Pagan Symbols, when mysterious, blood-drenched patterns are found all over the body. However, Fache's suspicions of Robert have already been aroused and, unknown to the professor, he's slipped a tracking device on him. Then Agent Nevu(Audrey Tautou) intervenes, springs him from the museum and begins a wild chase around Paris full of wild twists and turns. Robert learns the curator was Nevu's grand-father and was involved with a religious sect called The Priory of Sion. It all mounts up to a monk, Silas (Paul Bettany) sent by the religious sect of Opus Dei and the ultimate re-writing of history.



There's nothing like controversy to get something talked about, and it seems the best results are when that controversy involves religion. Dan Brown's much talked about novel The Da Vinci Code set off much consternation by basically re-writing the bible- and now that controversy has been adapted to the big screen.
The book suffered from badly constructed dialogue but still managed to be a relentless, addictive, page turner that fired at you with interesting fact after interesting fact and kept you on the edge of your tether till the climactic finale. The film adaptation, then, is as good as can be expected. It's well cast. Tom Hanks is just the kind of lead you need for this kind of thing, but he's not at his best here. Jean Reno also has appeal as Captain Fache, Tautou and Bettany are also very engaging in support but it's Ian McKellen who steals the show here as eccentric old grail enthusiast Sir Leigh Teabing, delivering the most spirited and compelling performance. Also, lets not forget talented director, Ron Howard. Although if you've read the book, the film offers little in the way of it's own variation upon the story's lucrative measures.

''Why is it divine or human? Can't human be divine?''

Some of the facts are unnecessarily distorted like Jacque Suniere was not really Sophie's Grand-father, but in fact he is shown to be her real Grand-father in the novel. She even has a brother that she is re-united with in the end. Most importantly, the reason, a man would entrust the most powerful secret in history of mankind to a man he has never met before is once again given a sexist explanation in the movie. Sophie is too clueless and too helpless to resolve the mystery on her own so the wise Grandfather tells her to find her Knight in shining armour, Robert Langdon. To an extent that maybe the case, however, even more important reason is that Robert Langdon had written a manuscript that his publisher had sent to Jacque Suniere to get his praise for the book and in that he unknowingly spells out the location of the Grail itself.

Aside from altering the underlying main theme of the Novel, the main focus of the 'Knights Templars' and 'Priory of Sion',proves to be an interesting range of vocal points and analogies.
Usually one finds that novel was way better than the film, but here the difference is debatable. You could for all practical purposes either watch this or read the Novel, missing certain details, from what I stated in the above points.
Upon a closing note, the score by Hans Zimmer and the closing majesty regarding that final piece; Chevaliers de Sangreal deserves a special five star honour. The beauty of The Da Vinci Code rests with it's hidden truths and ultimately with it's imaginative story which Ron Howard captures more or less despite what critics say.

''The holy grail 'neath ancient Roslin waits. The blade and chalice guarding o'er her gates. Adorned in masters' loving art, she lies. She rests at last beneath the starry skys.''