NEW REVIEW!!!
THE DA VINCI CODE
(2006, dir. Ron Howard)

Albert Schweitzer once said something to the effect of (I'm paraphrasing): "A man who endeavors to discover the historical Jesus Christ will inevitably discover himself."  Meaning, quite simply, that anyone searching for the truth about Jesus the man (as opposed to the Savior of the Christian people) will paint a self-portrait rather than an accurate one of the historical figure.  If that is the case, it seems only fitting that Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, a heist/murder mystery disguised as a search for Christ's bloodline, would portray the historical Jesus as what Brown truly is: a fake.

Man of the people, Ron Howard, has unceremoniously given us the screen version of not only Dan Brown's quest for the Holy Grail but also Brown's heroic attempt to form a complete thought.  Standing on the shoulders of morons, the film suffers from a stop-and-start pace to which I'm sure Akiva Goldsman was a major contributor.  (THE GUY WROTE THE LAST TWO BATMAN FOREVER AND BATMAN & ROBIN, LEST WE FORGET!)

Tom Hanks, looking more like a shady art teacher than a Harvard professor of symbology, turns in the most relaxed performance of a man attempting to clear his name in the history of cinema. He and Amelie (or a lobotomized Audrey Tautou) are in a race against time to decipher the most confusing scavanger hunt ever. And also the longest... honestly twenty minutes could've easily been cut from this film. Instead the film sprawls about for two and a half hours like a melodramatic opera as produced by the Lifetime channel.

The only real excitement comes from the soothing quips of Ian McKellan, the British stage actor, whose sudden career renaissance as go-to guy for American action films I never saw coming. Paul Bettany freaks me out beyond belief in general. I saw him two weeks ago in Park Slope and feared for my life. Anyone who can tell me who Alfred Molina was in this movie will be helping me out big time.



You cannot make me say anything bad about Ron Howard unless you can magically erase American Graffiti from existence.  As a director, he's not Fritz Lang but, again, AMERICAN GRAFFITI!!  I will say that Howard's last two films after his Best Director win for A Beautiful Mind were steps in an intriguing direction.  Where his previous films seemed to be cinematic deifications of various forms of feel-good Americana, the messy The Missing and the underrated Cinderella Man, marked Howard's first real attempt to experiment with genres and the style of his predecessors.  For these films I heartily applaud his gumption. 

Unfortunately Da Vinci is a step backward though he serves up some arresting images in the first 90 minutes.  As with The Grinch, which was saturated in potential merchandizing, any defining Howard characteristic is ultimately lost in The Da Vinci Code which was destined to be a glossy summer novel of a movie long before anyone signed on to direct it.  All in all, it's not a terrible movie. It's just a pretty unnecessary one.

As for the theological credibility of the piece, who cares! All I have to say is if someone wrote an account of any other religion that discounted several centuries of persecution in order "make it more interesting", it would be considered insensitive.  Portraying Constantine's conversion as the first instance anyone claiming Jesus' divinity is a little disrespectful in my opinion.  It's a good thing the Catholic Church has been completely defanged and awaiting euthanasia.

Bottom Line:  Good fodder for dinner conversation.  Those dinners where you don't really know the other people.  "Anyone seen Da Vinci?  Thoughts?"  But other than that a pretty limp film.