REVIEWED - THE DA VINCI CODE: In recent years, only Crazy Frog has divided critics and the public more than Dan Brown. Pundits in big, clever newspapers such as this have laid waste to whole forests in their efforts to reveal Brown's slapdash attitude to both logic and language. Yet every time we get on a plane we find the heads either side of us inclined towards The Da Vinci Code or one of Brown's other equally dreadful not-quite novels. The message is clear: take that, you elitist scum. We're going to eat this garbage and call it ice cream.
Of course, there is a tradition of bad novels making good films. Hitchcock, feeling that proper literature demanded annoying levels of fidelity from the adaptor, actively preferred working with pulp. Surely, when the slew of unnecessary adverbs and uncertain participles is washed away, The Da Vinci Code should provide the material for a darn good romp?
Not a bit of it. Ron Howard's interminably boring movie, more faithful to the turgid text than seems sane, serves to remind us that the novel does not have the discipline or sense of purpose that pulp generally requires. There is nothing here you would call a plot, just a rudimentary structure upon whose walls the author has scrawled his endlessly preposterous conspiracy theories. Reading this stuff is tedious enough. Listening to it being droned out by distracted-looking actors is sheer torture.
The film begins with a lecture and that is how it continues. Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), Professor of Silly Nonsense at Harvard, is addressing a French audience on the subject of signs and their meanings. At a book signing following the talk, he is approached by a detective, who informs him that his name has arisen in connection with a murder at the Louvre. There he meets a police cryptologist played - in a performance whose stultifying woodenness we shall charitably attribute to language difficulties - by a constantly furrowed Audrey Tautou.
Some stuff happens and they find themselves hiding in the lavatory. They tell each other about riddles and ancient legends. Some more stuff happens and they end up in the back of a truck. They tell each other about the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar. Yet more stuff happens before tea is taken with an outrageously hammy Ian McKellen.
They tell each other about the myth which suggests that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene. For the love of Mike, will you all shut up for two minutes and bloody do something.
The production notes claim that Akiva Goldsman, who worked with Howard on the overrated A Beautiful Mind and the underrated Cinderella Man, wrote some sort of script for the film. What Mr Goldsman, almost certainly terrified of radically altering such a successful book, did beyond cutting out swathes of Brown's rambling, cliche-rich dialogue and pasting it onto idiot boards is not made clear. Not since The Phantom Menace has an event movie urged its actors to say quite so many stupid things at quite such length.
So, does the film have anything to recommend it? Paul Bettany is, whether on purpose or not, invigoratingly over the top as a mad albino monk. Tom Hanks, one of the few stars doughy and plain enough to convince as an academic, just about retains his dignity. And the digs at Opus Dei have managed to enrage certain reactionary forces that deserve to be so disturbed. None of which is enough to make the two and a half hours pass at anything faster than a drugged crawl.
There ends this elitist's dispatch from the ivory tower.
