"The Da Vinci Code"
Director: Ron Howard
The Fien Print Rating (Out of 100): 20
In a Nutshell: You may have heard about the negative reaction to this one at its first Cannes screening and thought "Surely that was just an example of cranky, jet-lagged journalists being annoyed at having to wait to see a 150 minute movie and it can't be that bad." Actually, it's every bit that bad. Courtesy of Akiva Goldsman comes an over-literal adaptation that treats Dan Brown's sub-par pot-boiler as if it were genuinely important literature. That means that a disgraceful amount of Brown's tin-eared dialogue remains untouched and do 10 or 15 minute momentum-killing scenes in which one character after another lectures the audience on different iffy bits of history as if they were gospel. Tom Hanks, sporting a bad, but not distractingly bad, haircut is stuck playing one of the most insufferable heroes in all of literary and cinematic history -- Robert Langdon is like a drunken know-it-all at a party who has a boring fact about absolutely everything and feels inclined to share his knowledge with you at every turn, treating you like you're five years old. Everybody takes the material painfully seriously and at the aforementioned 150 minutes, I don't say "painfully" casually. And yet, there are people out there who believe that "The Da Vinci Code" is literature, that it's a book to savor. If any of you read this blog -- for shame! Those people, though, may LOVE this movie.
My review should be up on Zap2it by Thursday, May 18.
I hated the book, so I guess the movie is gonna be DOA for me. Yet, I will still see it as I am a SUCKER for an overhyped summer movie. I've already seen Mission Impossible 3 and Poseiden, for goodness sake.
ReplyDeleteI have a problem.
I hate to say it, but as somebody who hated the book, I found "Da Vinci" far harder to sit through than either Mission Impossible 3 (which I kinda liked) or Poseidon (which I mostly disliked).
ReplyDeleteBut it'll make a killing.
That's why I love people.