During the opening credits of Ron Howard’s by-the-book
adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code,” words appear on the
screen in a very simple manner. Instead of materializing the
cryptic subject matter of Dan Brown’s thriller into an
opening sequence that has words and numbers flashing everywhere to
eventually reveal their hidden meanings, Howard simply offers the
necessary information and crisply moves on. Never before has it
been so obvious that what will appear for the next 149 minutes is a
movie, and nothing more.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Movies can be
entertaining, and “The Da Vinci Code” certainly is
““ but that’s all it is. In the weeks leading up to the
film’s release, the publicity campaign behind the movie hyped
“The Da Vinci Code” into a must-see event, inevitably
raising expectations of the film itself in the process. Sporting a
superstar cast that includes Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Ian
McKellen, “The Da Vinci Code” seemed ready to reinvent
the action-adventure summer blockbuster.
Much like the subject matter of the story, illusions can be more
powerful than reality. The film is a competent adaptation of the
book and deserves its spot amid summer fare like “Mission:
Impossible 3″ and a bunch of superhero movies. It
doesn’t, however, stand out among them. Though Howard’s
“Da Vinci Code” grazes the book’s ceiling of
potential, the marketing campaign has raised that ceiling a few
feet higher. Only a giant could reach it, and the film is merely
tall.
It might seem unfair to judge a film based on the media frenzy
around it, but when expectations are higher than high, it’s
impossible not to. At the press screening I attended, I overheard
one man exclaim, “Dude, everyone from “˜Entertainment
Tonight’ is here!” and noticed more than one TV news
truck on site to interview people about the film’s religious
implications. To save space, I’ll sum those up in just a
sentence: If the church is afraid of “The Da Vinci
Code,” that says more about the church than the film.
On its own, the film reflects Brown’s entertaining story
with the kind of polished filmmaking expected of the creative team
and cast. At times, characters obviously talk for the sake of the
audience rather than fellow characters, such as when Sophie
(Tautou) describes the detailed inner workings of a cryptex to
Robert Langdon (Hanks), who already knows that information and
more. Fortunately, such obvious meltdowns are generally few.
For the most part, Howard handles the difficult combination of
action sequences and art history lectures by highlighting the
former and limiting the latter; most of the lectures feature visual
representations of the events being described so the film
doesn’t turn into a drawing-room conspiracy of talking heads.
The technique works, but is in no way new or cinematically
interesting. The codes, though meaningless, are more intriguing in
“A Beautiful Mind.”