'The Da Vinci Code' isn't a work of art

Concerns about the film undermining Christianity have some merit.
By ROGER MOORE
THE ORLANDO SENTINEL
Ron Howard doesn't so much solve "The Da Vinci Code" as preserve it under glass. It's a bloodless best-seller adaptation, competent but uninspiring, rather like the vast bulk of Howard's long filmography.
The filmmaker and his screenwriter (Akiva Goldsman) treated this hot-button best-seller -- about a mad dash to find "the Holy Grail," that one big historic secret that topples Christianity and makes Mel Gibson weep the tears of the naive -- like a hot potato, backing away from some of its more controversial elements and altering its ending.
In a tale driven by blockbuster revelations, running on momentum, history and myth, Howard doesn't give the "Holy cow" moments enough pop or the jokes enough kick. It almost adds up to 21/2 hours of Tom Hanks lecturing the world on novelist Dan Brown's fanciful alternative history. And two Oscars or not, Hanks isn't that scintillating.
He plays the hero, Professor Robert Langdon, a Harvard "symbiologist" who knows the history of symbols, from the swastika to the supposedly satanic pentacle, the Star of David to the hidden messages in Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings.
Plot
A curator at the Louvre has been murdered, and Langdon is summoned by the French police. Jean Reno is their dogged chief. He wonders if Langdon has something to do with the creative way the dying man positioned himself (like a Da Vinci painting) and the clues he left behind. Langdon is saved from further questioning by another French cop, Sophie (Audrey Tautou of "Amelie"), a code-breaker.
They set out to solve the puzzle the dead man left behind, to find what Monty Python and Indiana Jones coveted -- the Holy Grail.
Meanwhile, the real killer, a cloaked albino monk (Paul Bettany, superb) is wandering the streets of Paris, bleeding (he beats himself to suffer like Christ), praying in Latin and murdering people. His Opus Dei (a Catholic sect) boss (Alfred Molina) has sent him on a Grail quest. And they're taking orders from the mysterious "Teacher."
All this, the cops and fanatical monk chasing Langdon and Sophie, takes an hour to set up. Then, Sir Ian McKellen shows up and the Once-and-Future-Gandalf almost single-handedly saves the picture. As Sir Leigh Teabing, Grail scholar and enthusiast, he is playful, passionate, bowled over by what the duo has uncovered about "the con of man," as the invention of Christianity is called here. He explains a lot of the history (delivered in creatively mounted flashbacks) to Sophie.
"The Good Book did not arrive by facsimile from heaven," he chuckles, winking at Hanks as if to say, 'Two Oscars? Here's what acting looks like, boy!"
Clues are creatively decoded, lovely old churches are visited and forgotten pieces of the chaotic political history of Christianity are shown in between dull chases and shootouts.
Picking up speed
"The Da Vinci Code" picks up some of the speed it should have had at the outset when McKellen shows up. A movie based on a page-turner (all plot, little else) needs rapid pacing. There should be an urgency to the proceedings, a sense that yes, the villains have much to fear and will be ruthless -- that yes, the truth is out there. Or should be.
And yes, worries about the movie undermining Christianity have some merit. Real historians (as opposed to Brown, who got some things wrong) and archaeologists are punching holes in the Bible-as-literal-history on a weekly basis -- documents changing the view of Judas, evidence that Solomon didn't build the temple with his name on it, that David was more bandit than actual king. "Bible Code" fans and believers in the supernatural probably won't be amused.
Howard, understandably, doesn't want to get too deep into that. He's not a bold filmmaker by nature, and the controversy here seems to make him more tentative than usual.
He doesn't have to undermine Christianity as we know it to earn Hanks another Oscar or be reverent to a book that, let's face it, is no classic.
Truth be told, all Howard really had to do with this historian's treasure hunt was be as entertaining as the cheesy "Treasure Hunt." He isn't.