Film Review: Da Vinci Code

It was a movie that had to be made, really, One of the biggest literary phenomena of modern times, a book challenging core values and beliefs in the Christian faith, which has dominated all the bestseller lists. Hollywood needed to release it - it needed a big lead actor (in this case Tom Hanks), and the two biggest French stars on the planet (Audrey Tautou and Jean Reno), and it needed to have a big name director. Someone who could take a massively familiar story, and spin it out on film.

I don't blame Ron Howard for taking this - but he was on a hiding to nothing really. The central core of the book is the revelations on the bloodline of Christ and the representation of the feminine within Christian doctrine. And therein lies the problem. Whereas the book could tease out a little more of the theory a bit at a time, under the backdrop of a police hunt and a race against time, the film struggles to establish its identity. At times the music gets a bit racy and i feels like a thriller. Then you have massive periods of down pacing where the talkie theoretical bits are. It all adds to a disjointed feel - a detailed faithhful teling of the bok, but not a great movie.

Howard does not ask much of his actors either - the screenplay has to fit so many fatual details in that there is no latitude given to character development. As such, Hanks is wooden, the wonderfully talented Tautou is underused, and Jean Reno never gets out of first gear. Paul Bettany plays the only really interesting character, but as a man-robot following Opus Dei directions, he is asked to suppress his emotions, until a little flourish at the end. An actnig masterclass it is not. Perhaps the most disappointing outcome of all this is that th lead pair have absolutely no chemistry at all. I mean, they even snogged in the book. But with all the plot to cram in, there was no space allowed to develop their fondness for each other.

In other areas, everything was competent, without being great. The score was ok, the editing was ok, the direction solid. the only thig that stood out was the lighting; in the many churches filmed, the lighting and camera work was excellent. But coupled with mediocre acting, wooden performances, and a disjointed pacing, the film serves only as a faithful, if soulless reproduction of the book, and all the poorer for it. 6/10