There are many criticisms you can make of Dan Brown’s "The Da Vinci Code". It is poorly written, contains plot holes the size of the Lourve and is completely implausible in many areas. Despite its short comings, 40 million sales have made its author a very wealthy man. I can’t remember a book that has caused so much debate and generated as much attention since…well, the Bible.
After being swept along with the hysteria I succumbed and finally read the thing but I was left disappointed mainly due to Brown’s need to make every page a cliff hanger. He crams in so many twists that the plot lurches from one unlikely explanation to another like a tiny sailboat in the high seas managing to keep afloat despite being repeatedly submerged by gargantuan leaps in logic.
The book’s saving grace is that at its core it does put forward an interesting view on the whole topic of Jesus Christ’s place in history. Was he the son of God or just a charismatic man who lived to make the world a better place? A sandal wearing Bono, if you will.
Ron Howard’s big budget adaptation is not as bad as reviews have suggested. The story still remains true to the book which is no mean feat after the intense lobbying from bible bashers world wide when it got out that the book would be made into a film. The use of flashbacks and computer generated jiggery-pokery actually help the Da Vinci Code virgin to digest the history lesson at the centre of the story that is harder to visualise in the book.
However, the film cannot disguise the clunky story line and much of the supposition the viewer is supposed to make about Da Vinci’s work, secret societies and their motivations and how within 3 minutes of entering a remote Scottish church the vicar can summon 20 grail disciples including the lead’s grand mother. I’m not ruining the story am I, don’t tell me you haven’t read it?
Tom Hanks is surprisingly bland and unengaging as Harvard symoblogist Robert Langdon who inadvertently gets embroiled into this flight of fancy with the equally unremarkable Audrey Tautou when an elderly curator gets murdered at the Louvre. Thankfully the film’s atmospheric visuals and a couple of good performances from Sir Ian McKellen as an eccentric grail-chaser and Paul Bethany as the sinister masochistic monk on their tails ensure that the 148 minutes are not as painful as wearing barbed wire round your leg for your sins.
If you haven’t read the book my advice is not to bother and maybe to wait until this comes out on DVD before you learn how we have been lied to for 2000 years. If you have waited this long for the truth you can wait another 6 months can’t you?
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