Can $77 million's worth of weekend box office be wrong?
Geek alert! If you were the kind of kid who liked Clark Kent better than Superman, who preferred Professor Jones lecturing at Princeton to Indy rampaging through North
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Africa or who only found
Stargate
interesting for the length of time it took a bespectacled James Spader to crack the alien hieroglyphic-well, then you'll love
The Da Vinci Code
! But you might not, because it doesn't have James Spader in it.
Instead, in some weird, untenable compromise between beefcake and middlebrow, Tom Hanks stars as Harvard "symbologist" Robert Langdon. "Symbols speak a language; but which one?" Langdon asks his Parisian audience fatuously during a presentation; he then demonstrates (with only three slides!) that no one besides him knows anything about iconography. Naturally, while signing books afterward, Langdon's asked by the gendarmerie to assist with a murder case-no doubt they were dazzled with such ineluctable PowerPoint.
An acquaintance of Langdon's has not only been killed but, before shuffling off this mortal coil, found time to create some performance art: he's arranged his limbs à la Da Vinci's Vetruvian man, scribbling a bit of mathematics on the parquet and a gory pentacle on himself before expiring. Enter cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), the victim's granddaughter, who bears Startling Information for Langdon. All this abruptly leads to a clandestine midnight tour of the Da Vinci wing and Langdon's and Neveu's flight from Paris; frantically intercut scenes suggest that a Catholic order called Opus Dei are not only evil cultists who brainwash their lay followers but who also are covering up something naughty, in addition to indulging the charming anachronism of speaking
Latin into their cellphones. "We follow doctrine, rigorously," clarifies the
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order's bishop (Alfred Molina), rigor which apparently extends to tasking monastic albino hitman Silas (
Master and Commander
's Paul Bettany sporting a bleach job). Per instructions from his mysterious "Teacher," Silas murders his way across France one step ahead of Neveu and Langdon, graphically mortifying his flesh in penance and reporting back such revelations as: "The legend is true. It hides beneath the Rose." "It," in case you've been living in El Rito without cable access, is the Holy Grail (props to Opus Dei for history's worst-kept "secret so powerful that if revealed it would devastate the very foundations of mankind!"); but thank goodness we've got a symbologist handy, which suggests the existence of a symbol…and thank goodness Langdon seems to have played a lot of Boggle in his day.
All this by no means implies that the movie isn't fairly entertaining; writer Goldsman and director Howard have already demonstrated their hand at rendering otherwise talky topics visual (no one who saw
A Beautiful Mind
can soon forget the blonde-brunette demonstration of Nash's equilibrium theorem, though it was, technically, incorrect). While much of what's amusing may be unintentionally so (including the dialogue: "I have to get to a library-fast!"), Howard keeps things moving quickly enough so that you can't really dwell on the idiocies, which is an infinite improvement over Brown's book-all the more impressive when you consider that the "secret so powerful that if revealed it would devastate the very foundations of mankind!" was actually revealed in 1945 with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. Reminiscent of the
X-Files
in its heyday, with somewhat less prepossessing leads and a soupy Hans Zimmer score,
The Da Vinci Code
is the first chunk of summer fare that's almost competent, which at this decadent, late-empire stage of the game, is pretty darn…OK.
