The Da Vinci Code: the movie review

Darin is quite the busy little bee this week, so instead of our usual Date Night™ I went out by myself. We have done this a few times before — most memorably when it was NaNoWriMo and I wanted to write, so Darin took himself to see a movie he’d never convince me to go to, Team America: World Police. Afterward he came into the Santana Row Starbucks where I’d been writing and said, “You dodged a bullet.”

Well, I won’t go quite so far as to say he dodged a bullet on The Da Vinci Code, but he doesn’t need to go see it, either. It’s long — two and a half hours, even with Tom Hanks (whom I really like), is easily half an hour too much — it’s ponderous, and it’s pretty silly. I don’t really remember much of the book, other than thinking, “Wow, the guys who wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail should totally sue.” (They did, and look how that turned out for them. I’m not a damn lawyer, people!) So whatever I have to say about this is completely based on the movie.

Upsides of the movie: actors actually getting to act smart. Downsides: the story doesn’t make any damn sense.

No, I’m not even talking about the Grand Conspiracy part of the story not making sense. I figure every movie has at least one gimme, and in the case of The Da Vinci Code it’s “There’s a really powerful conspiracy out to suppress the truth.” (I knew someone who couldn’t watch Face Off because, as she put it, “You can’t take someone’s face off.” Well, if you can’t give them that, there’s no point in watching the movie.) No, there’s one looming story question that bugged me during the movie, and it bugs me now.

In case you’re new to our planet and haven’t heard about it, The Da Vinci Code is the story of Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) as he uncovers the grand conspiracy by the Catholic Church to suppress the information that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and founded a dynasty. As the characters point out about twenty thousand times during the movie, the Church has been actively working to erase this information and all of the evidence for it for approximately two thousand years. We’re talking Crusades. We’re talking the Inquisition. We’re talking the Illuminati, okay?

So why is this story happening right now?

I have no idea what starts the killing spree/chase for the Grail on this day that Our Hero gets caught up in. If the movie has an explanation for why the Grand Master and the three Seneschals of the Priory of Sion have to be murdered right now I missed it. There’s something about how the Priory was going to reveal the Heir at the Millennium, but according to my watch that was six years ago and no Heir was revealed, so what’s the rush? In fact, once you think about it, the entire story doesn’t happen unless Robert Langdon is involved, which is kind of like, “Let’s build the train station here because this is where the train stops” instead of the other way around. Cleverly there’s so much going on that we don’t really have time to think about that, but please: it is to give the headache.

(My secondary plot problem is: how does Sophie know her grandfather’s been murdered, and how does she know to show up and save Langdon? No, one erased line of blood doesn’t cover it. But I can’t even begin to contemplate the plot problems with that part.)

Tom Hanks doesn’t have much to do except act smart (which he appears to do okay). Audrey Tautou looks confused and upset most of the time. Sir Ian McKellan, would you like béarnaise sauce with that scenery? Actually, he’s hilarious, and definitely the best thing in the movie. Jean Reno: extremely French. (And how about those French cops, eh? They’re made out to be the world’s stupidest cops, seriously. They bring their number one suspect to the crime scene to spur him into a confession? The entire force leaves to go chasing Langdon’s GPS tracker? Seriously? Bad cop, no pain au chocolat.)

It would have been a much better movie if it had been a mite faster and had more of the history along the way. The whole pursuit thing — not really that interesting.