The De Vinci Code
  
Now as the readers of my reviews on a regular basis well know, my taste in films are in favour of art house and I can be very critical of some of the main stream product that fall of the hollywood conveyor belt. But every now and again there comes a mainstream film that I think is worthy of praise and doesn’t require the audience to switch of their brain off when the lights go down. The De Vinci Code is one such film.
 
This is a film that demands attention and automatically assumes the audience is given it just that as it comes at you fast and the furiously and seldom lets up. Its labyrinthine narrative of religious conspiracies, Christian revisionism, and complex puzzle-clues don't make for a leisurely/attention deficit disorder experience, but it's not taxing to the point of inducing a headache.
 
Akiva Goldman's faithful adaptation of Dan Brown's runaway bestseller and pop-culture phenomenon treats the novel as if it were a sacred text, and while the blur between the film and its literary source should come as no real surprise, given how reading The Da Vinci Code often felt like watching a movie. The novel's freight-train storyline and cliff-hanger chapter endings had a cinematic feel to them, although those commonly executed elements were the book's weakest links compared to the seemingly difficult to film riddles and other word games Brown employed to unravel its fictional mystery about the true identity of the Holy Grail. But where the book gave the reader a sense of participation in solving that theological whodunit, the film relegates the audience to the passive role of digesting pieces of information as fast as it can spit them out. In that regard, The Da Vinci Code takes you along for the ride, but it never deigns to ask you where you’d like to go. To be honest it would be been very difficult to film it (and keep it within the confines of a mainstream movie) any other way and director Ron Howard does a tremendous job of keeping up the film's pace and an outstanding job of visualizing the clues that provide the key to what one fanatical character (a delightful McKellen) calls the "greatest cover-up in history." (The deconstruction of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" is so particularly well-done that it's hard to argue with its logic, if you're open-minded to that sort of thing.)
 
Tom Hanks delivers a superbly subdued role as the scholar on the run from the French police after being wrongly accused of a curator’s murder in the Louvre that sets the plot in high gear.
 
Ultimately The Da Vinci Code is really nothing more than a Hardy Boys tale dressed up in the provocative attire of questioning centuries-old Christian beliefs about the divinity of Jesus Christ, the role of Mary Magdalene, and other aspects of the faith. But with that said, it sure makes for some excellent entertainment.
 
 
Paul Elliott

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