Oh Draconian Director, O Lame Movie!

I went to see the movie, The Da Vinci Code last night, and when I awoke this morning to post about the movie, I was instantly struck with a memory of the poem G.K. Chesterton inscribed in a copy of a book he himself wrote that he did not care for, and it rather sums up my impression of the movie The Da Vinci Code:

This is a book I do not like,
Take it away to Heckmondwike,
A lurid exile, lost and sad,
to punish it for being bad.
You need not take it from the shelf,
(I tried to read it once myself:
The speeches jerk, the chapters sprawl,
The story makes no sense at all)
Hide it your Yorkshire moors among
Where no man speaks the English tongue.

First and foremost, the movie was not subtle enough. This is classic Hollywood, I understand, but good grief--showing the sarcophogus of Mary Magdalene at the end? I am attempting to think of an exaggerated example to prove my point, but I truly cannot fathom anything more blatantly obvious than that. Anybody who hadn't read the book could have figured out that Remy was a bad guy, and most likely that Teabing (Ian McKellan) was too, within about, oh the first forty-five seconds after their appearance on the screen. Where was the secret conspiracy? They showed the viewer everything.

The enjoyment of thinking about and breaking the codes that were scattered throughout the movie was lost in the rather inconceivably lame sequences where Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) lit up letters with his eyes and pictured scenes that materialized in front of him. I wasn't sure if I was watching a mystery-thriller or a really bad B rendition of CONTACT.

The acting, too, was...lacking. Tom Hanks delivered a rather mediocre performance at best, though perhaps we can blame it on the utterly bankrupt directing skills of Ron Howard. Jean Reno, who played Captain Bezu Fache, was the only believable character who went through any sort of development in the film. Langdon and Sophie Neveu, who were supposed to be the most round of all the characters were not appreciably different by the end of the movie than they were at the beginning.

I was thoroughly disappointed in the quality of the movie, and again must express that the movie's worst quality, like the book's, is its abject denial of the Divinity of Christ. It is most certainly heresy--but fortunately in our country heretics, too, are free to make truly awful movies.