So, when we fell off the Best Picture wagon, we fell hard. Inspired by the looming threat of winter storm and maybe one too many Yuengling Lights, we decided to throw The Da Vinci Code into the DVD player and see if it was bad was we remembered.
Surprise! The answer is yes! It's awful. Jawdroppingly, how-did-this-happen awful?
(Sidenote: We have no idea how we came to own this DVD.)
On paper, this movie looks great. Adapted from Dan Brown's mega-selling page turner, directed with typical workmanlike efficiency by Ron Howard, starring the fantastic Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellan (in a role that lets him play in his impish British gentleman wheelhouse), and America's favorite leading man, Tom Hanks. What could go wrong?
For starters, all the weaknesses of Brown's writing are exposed on film. Brown is a master plotter and the book unfolds with relentless urgency; any dead spots brightened up by the puzzle after puzzle for the reader to work through. The wooden prose and silly conspiracy stuff doesn't even matter because we are racing to find out what happens next. But the film viewer doesn't get the satisfaction of seeing and working through the puzzles for themselves - at least not in this script. What we're left with is a lot of watching other people sit around, thinking out loud, and explaining things.
That can work with the right characters (have you seen any Richard Linklater film?). But not here. Robert Langdon was a bland facsimile of Indiana Jones without the whip on paper, and he's even less than that here. Hanks gets almost nothing to work with. It feels like he has less than 25% of the dialogue and mostly then just to express surprise at what he's being told. And he gets told a lot of stuff. And a lot of what he's told thuds as expositorily as an entry level religious studies lecture.
What was a catch-your-breath whodunit on paper thus becomes a when-does-this-thing-end quasi-history lesson on film.
And we really, who in god's name forced Tom Hanks to do that to his head? The man is living icon. FOR SHAME!
Don't even get me started on Paul Bettany.
FINAL VERDICT: PITCH
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