Leaden, inane, and unintentionally humorous, it’s a controversy-courting adventure that, in its turgid stab at highbrow murder mystery, is apt to not only anger pious Catholics who find its make-believe story blasphemous, but try the patience and insult the intelligence of anyone other than the book’s most devout fans.ĭespite having been disparaged as little more than a screenplay template, Brown’s novel is, in fact, a largely static affair that alternates between un-cinematic conversations about feminine religious symbolism and tacked-on chase sequences, its structure easily broken down into a talk-run-talk formula. The weightiest thing about the film, however, is its 149-minute running time, during which the director (along with A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man scribe Akiva Goldsman) manages the semi-miraculous feat of condensing his source material’s wealth of intricate puzzles and yet nonetheless making his race-around-Europe narrative feel appreciably more bloated than it did on the page.
#THE DA VINCI CODE SOUNDTRACK MOVIE#
No surprise, then, that Howard’s movie version of the über-bestseller is a barely endurable enterprise, the kind of summer season blockbuster that wants to have its dead sea scrolls and show them off too, delivering popcorn thrills and intrigue while also affecting an air of somber erudition intended to bestow its tale of bibilical secrets and clerical cover-ups with some serious, scholarly heft. Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a marriage made in mediocrity, he a middlebrow moviemaker of vanilla prestige pictures and the novel a convoluted piece of historical fiction twaddle that utilizes diligently researched facts and myths to obscure its pervasive preposterousness.